Differential Evolution With Ranking-Based Mutation Operators

Differential evolution (DE) has been proven to be one of the most powerful global numerical optimization algorithms in the evolutionary algorithm family. The core operator of DE is the differential mutation operator. Generally, the parents in the mutation operator are randomly chosen from the current population. In nature, good species always contain good information, and hence, they have more chance to be utilized to guide other species. Inspired by this phenomenon, in this paper, we propose the ranking-based mutation operators for the DE algorithm, where some of the parents in the mutation operators are proportionally selected according to their rankings in the current population. The higher ranking a parent obtains, the more opportunity it will be selected. In order to evaluate the influence of our proposed ranking-based mutation operators on DE, our approach is compared with the jDE algorithm, which is a highly competitive DE variant with self-adaptive parameters, with different mutation operators. In addition, the proposed ranking-based mutation operators are also integrated into other advanced DE variants to verify the effect on them. Experimental results indicate that our proposed ranking-based mutation operators are able to enhance the performance of the original DE algorithm and the advanced DE algorithms.