Differential Evolution Using Mixed Strategies in Competitive Environment

Differential evolution (DE) is a powerful yet simple evolutionary algorithm for optimizing real valued optimization problems. Traditional investigations with DE have used a single mutation operator. Using a variety of mutation operators that can be integrated during evolution could hold the potential to generate a better solution with less computational effort. In view of this, in the present study a mixed mutation strategy which uses the concept of evolutionary game theory is proposed integrating the basic DE mutation and quadratic interpolation based mutation to generate a new solution. Throughout of this paper we refer this new algorithm as, Mixed Strategy DE (MSDE). The performance of proposed MSDE is investigated and compared with basic DE and some other modified versions of DE available in literature. The experiments conducted show the competence of the proposed MSDE algorithm.