Hybridizing Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization to Design Powerful Optimizers: A Review and Taxonomy

Differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are two formidable population-based optimizers (POs) that follow different philosophies and paradigms, which are successfully and widely applied in scientific and engineering research. The hybridization between DE and PSO represents a promising way to create more powerful optimizers, especially for specific problem solving. In the past decade, numerous hybrids of DE and PSO have emerged with diverse design ideas from many researchers. This paper attempts to comprehensively review the existing hybrids based on DE and PSO with the goal of collection of different ideas to build a systematic taxonomy of hybridization strategies. Taking into account five hybridization factors, i.e., the relationship between parent optimizers, hybridization level, operating order (OO), type of information transfer (TIT), and type of transferred information (TTI), we propose several classification mechanisms and a versatile taxonomy to differentiate and analyze various hybridization strategies. A large number of hybrids, which include the hybrids of DE and PSO and several other representative hybrids, are categorized according to the taxonomy. The taxonomy can be utilized not only as a tool to identify different hybridization strategies, but also as a reference to design hybrid optimizers. The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation regarding hybridization design is discussed and highlighted. Based on the taxonomy proposed, this paper also indicates several promising lines of research that are worthy of devotion in future.