Global replacement-based differential evolution with neighbor-based memory for dynamic optimization

Dynamic optimization problems challenge the evolutionary algorithms, owing to the diversity loss or the low search efficiency of the algorithms, especially when the problems change frequently. This paper presents a novel differential evolution algorithm to address the dynamic optimization problems. Unlike the most used “DE/rand/1” mutation operator, in this paper, the “DE/best/1” mutation is employed to generate a mutant individual. In order to enhance the search efficiency of differential evolution, the classical differential evolution algorithm is modified by a novel replacement operator, in which the worst individual in the whole population is replaced by the newly generated trial vector as a “steady-state” manner. During optimizing, some newly generated solutions are stored into a memory set, in which these stored solutions are located around the current best solution. When the environmental change is detected, the stored solutions are expected to guide the reinitialized solutions to track the new location of global optimum as soon as possible. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with six state-of-the-art dynamic evolutionary algorithms over some benchmark problems. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm clearly outperforms the competitors.