A pointer-based discrete differential evolution

To solve the discrete optimization problem, the traditional continuous differential evolution (DE) algorithm has to be modified in individual representation or evolution strategy. Inspired from a pair of reciprocal operators (pointer and address-of) in computer programming language, a novel pointerbased discrete differential evolution (PDDE) is presented in this paper. Making use of the permutation of integers as the individual representation, PDDE redefines the addition and subtraction operations of traditional DE to construct discrete mutation operator. In addition, the scaling factor and crossover probability factor are redefined to fit the discrete operation. The performance of PDDE is evaluated through extensively experiments on comparing general searching ability and solving resource-constrained project scheduling problem. The computational results show that the proposed PDDE is efficient.