Dual-Subpopulation as reciprocal optional external archives for differential evolution

Differential Evolution (DE) is powerful for global optimization problems. Among DE algorithms, JADE and its variants, whose mutation strategy is DE/current-to-pbest/1 with optional archive, have good performance. A significant feature of the above mutation strategy is that one individual for difference operation comes from the union of the optional external archive and the population. In existing DE algorithms based on the mutation strategy—JADE and its variants, individuals eliminated from the population are send to the archive. In this paper, we propose a scheme for managing the optional external archive. According to our scheme, two subpopulations are maintained in the population. Each of them regards the other as the archive. In experiments, our scheme is applied in JADE and two of its variants—SHADE and L-SHADE. Experimental results show that our scheme can enhance JADE and its variants. Moreover, it can be seen that L-SHADE with our scheme performs significantly better than four DE algorithms, CoBiDE, MPEDE, EDEV, and MLCCDE.