Self-adaptive differential evolution with local search chains for real-parameter single-objective optimization

Differential evolution (DE), as a very powerful population-based stochastic optimizer, is one of the most active research topics in the field of evolutionary computation. Self-adaptive differential evolution (SaDE) is a well-known DE variant, which aims to relieve the practical difficulty faced by DE in selecting among many candidates the most effective search strategy and its associated parameters. SaDE operates with multiple candidate strategies and gradually adapts the employed strategy and its accompanying parameter setting via learning the preceding behavior of already applied strategies and their associated parameter settings. Although highly effective, SaDE concentrates more on exploration than exploitation. To enhance SaDE´s exploitation capability while maintaining its exploration power, we incorporate local search chains into SaDE following two different paradigms (Lamarckian and Baldwinian) that differ in the ways of utilizing local search results in SaDE. Our experiments are conducted on the CEC-2014 real-parameter single-objective optimization testbed. The statistical comparison results demonstrate that SaDE with Baldwinian local search chains, armed with suitable parameter settings, can significantly outperform original SaDE as well as classic DE at any tested problem dimensionality.