UDE: Differential Evolution with Uniform Design

Differential evolution (DE) is significantly faster and robust for solving numerical optimization problem and is more likely to find true global optimum of functions. It has solved many real-world optimization problems. However, DE has sometimes been shown slow convergence and low accuracy of solutions when the solution space is hard to explore. Population initialization is very important to the performance of differential evolution. A good initialization method can help in finding better solutions and improving convergence rate. In this paper, a uniform-differential evolution algorithm (UDE) is proposed. It incorporates uniform design initialization method into differential evolution to accelerate its convergence speed and improve the stability. UDE is compared with other two algorithms of standard differential evolution (SDE) and orthogonal differential evolution (ODE). Experiments have been conducted on 23 benchmark problems of diverse complexities. The results indicate that our approach has the stronger ability and higher calculation accuracy to find better solutions than other two algorithms.