A study on scale factor in distributed differential evolution

This paper proposes the employment of multiple scale factor values within distributed differential evolution structures. Four different scale factor schemes are proposed, tested, compared and analyzed. Two schemes simply employ multiple scale factor values and two also include an update logic during the evolution. The four schemes have been integrated for comparison within three recently proposed distributed differential evolution structures and tested on several various test problems. Numerical results show that, on average, the employment of multiple scale factors is beneficial since in most cases it leads to significant improvements in performance with respect to standard distributed algorithms. Although proper choice of a scale factor scheme appears to be dependent on the distributed structure, any of the proposed simple schemes has proven to significantly improve upon the single scale factor distributed differential evolution algorithms. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.