A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY ABOUT DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION

Abstract

The advance of the computational resources has encouraged the utilization of optimization techniques in the solution of complex engineering problems. Thus, it is very attractive to consider the possibility of joining the feature of natural optimization methods to one algorithm which allows to work with small populations and to reduce computational time greatly. The Differential Evolution (DE) is a simple evolutionary algorithm which has these advantages. The most distinct feature of DE is to perturb individuals of a population by weighted difference among random population individuals. In this work, the theoretical formulation, the basic algorithm and an application are presented. The simplicity and efficiency of the algorithm in terms of easy implementation are demonstrated by an engineering problem. The results are compared with those obtained by using Genetic Algorithms. Keywords: Optimization, Evolutionary algorithm, Differential evolution, Multi-objective optimization.