Differential Evolution enhanced by neighborhood search

This paper presents a novel Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, called DE enhanced by neighborhood search (DENS), which differs from pervious works of utilizing the neighborhood search in DE, such as DE with neighborhood search (NSDE) and self-adaptive DE with neighborhood search (SaNSDE). In DENS, we focus on searching the neighbors of individuals, while the latter two algorithms (NSDE and SaNSDE) work on the adaption of the control parameters F and CR. The proposed algorithm consists of two following main steps. First, for each individual, we create two trial individuals by local and global neighborhood search strategies. Second, we select the fittest one among the current individual and the two created trial individuals as a new current individual. Experimental studies on a comprehensive set of benchmark functions show that DENS achieves better results for a majority of test cases, when comparing with some other similar evolutionary algorithms.