A Landscape-Aware Differential Evolution for Multimodal Optimization Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a landscape-aware differential evolution algorithm that leverages landscape knowledge to effectively locate multiple peaks in multimodal optimization problems, improving search diversity and accuracy.

Contribution

The proposed LADE algorithm uniquely integrates landscape information into peak exploration, distinction, and reinitialization to enhance multimodal optimization performance.

Findings

LADE outperforms seven recent algorithms on benchmark MMOPs.

LADE achieves competitive results against four IEEE CEC winner algorithms.

The method effectively balances exploration and exploitation in multimodal landscapes.

Abstract

How to simultaneously locate multiple global peaks and achieve certain accuracy on the found peaks are two key challenges in solving multimodal optimization problems (MMOPs). In this paper, a landscape-aware differential evolution (LADE) algorithm is proposed for MMOPs, which utilizes landscape knowledge to maintain sufficient diversity and provide efficient search guidance. In detail, the landscape knowledge is efficiently utilized in the following three aspects. First, a landscape-aware peak exploration helps each individual evolve adaptively to locate a peak and simulates the regions of the found peaks according to search history to avoid an individual locating a found peak. Second, a landscape-aware peak distinction distinguishes whether an individual locates a new global peak, a new local peak, or a found peak. Accuracy refinement can thus only be conducted on the global peaks to enhance the search efficiency. Third, a landscape-aware reinitialization specifies the initial position of an individual adaptively according to the distribution of the found peaks, which helps explore more peaks. The experiments are conducted on 20 widely-used benchmark MMOPs. Experimental results show that LADE obtains generally better or competitive performance compared with seven well-performed algorithms proposed recently and four winner algorithms in the IEEE CEC competitions for multimodal optimization.