JADE: Adaptive Differential Evolution With Optional External Archive

A new differential evolution (DE) algorithm, JADE, is proposed to improve optimization performance by implementing a new mutation strategy DE/current-to-pbest with optional external archive and updating control parameters in an adaptive manner. The DE/current-to-pbest is a generalization of the classic DE/current-to-best, while the optional archive operation utilizes historical data to provide information of progress direction. Both operations diversify the population and improve the convergence performance. The parameter adaptation automatically updates the control parameters to appropriate values and avoids a user's prior knowledge of the relationship between the parameter settings and the characteristics of optimization problems. It is thus helpful to improve the robustness of the algorithm. Simulation results show that JADE is better than, or at least comparable to, other classic or adaptive DE algorithms, the canonical particle swarm optimization, and other evolutionary algorithms from the literature in terms of convergence performance for a set of 20 benchmark problems. JADE with an external archive shows promising results for relatively high dimensional problems. In addition, it clearly shows that there is no fixed control parameter setting suitable for various problems or even at different optimization stages of a single problem.