Empirical analysis of self-adaptive differential evolution

Differential evolution (DE) is generally considered as a reliable, accurate, robust and fast optimization technique. DE has been successfully applied to solve a wide range of numerical optimization problems. However, the user is required to set the values of the control parameters of DE for each problem. Such parameter tuning is a time consuming task. In this paper, a self-adaptive DE (SDE) algorithm which eliminates the need for manual tuning of control parameters is empirically analyzed. The performance of SDE is investigated and compared with other well-known approaches. The experiments conducted show that SDE generally outperform other DE algorithms in all the benchmark functions. Moreover, the performance of SDE using the ring neighborhood topology is investigated.