Evaluating differential evolution with penalty function to solve constrained engineering problems

Over the years, several metaheuristics have been developed to solve hard constrained and unconstrained optimization problems. In general, a metaheuristic is proposed and following researches are made to improve the original algorithm. In this paper, we evaluate a not so new metaheuristic called differential evolution (DE) to solve constrained engineering design problems and compare the results with some recent metaheuristics. Results show that the classical DE with a very simple penalty function to handle constraints is still very competitive in the tested problems.

► Complex constrained and unconstrained engineering optimization problems can be solved by metaheuristics.
► We compare the results of classical differential evolution (DE) with those of some state-of-the-art metaheuristics.
► We conclude that DE is competitive or even better.