Differential Evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most powerful and versatile evolutionary optimizers for the continuous parameter spaces in recent times. Almost 5 years have passed since the first comprehensive survey article was published on DE by Das and Suganthan in 2011. Several developments have been reported on various aspects of the algorithm in these 5 years and the research on and with DE have now reached an impressive state. Considering the huge progress of research with DE and its applications in diverse domains of science and technology, we find that it is a high time to provide a critical review of the latest literatures published and also to point out some important future avenues of research. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and organize the information on these current developments on DE. Beginning with a comprehensive foundation of the basic DE family of algorithms, we proceed through the recent proposals on parameter adaptation of DE, DE-based single-objective global optimizers, DE adopted for various optimization scenarios including constrained, large-scale, multi-objective, multi-modal and dynamic optimization, hybridization of DE with other optimizers, and also the multi-faceted literature on applications of DE. The paper also presents a dozen of interesting open problems and future research issues on DE.

Recent advances in differential evolution – An updated survey

Differential Evolution: A review of more than two decades of research

It is complex and difficult to perform the emergency scheduling of forest fires in order to reduce the operational cost and improve the efficiency of extinguishing fire services. A new research issue arises when: 1) decision-makers want to minimize the number of rescue vehicles (or fire-fighting ones) while minimizing the extinguishing time; and 2) decision-makers prefer to complete this task given limited vehicle resources. To do so, this paper presents a novel multiobjective scheduling model to handle forest fires subject to limited rescue vehicle (fire engine) constraints, in which a fire-spread speed model is introduced into this problem to better describe practical forestry fire. Moreover, a Multiobjective Hybrid Differential-Evolution Particle-Swarm-Optimization (MHDP) algorithm is proposed to create a set of Pareto solutions for this problem. This approach is applied to a real-world emergency scheduling problem of the forest fire in Mt. Daxing'anling, China. Its effectiveness is verified by comparing it with a genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to quickly produce satisfactory Pareto solutions.

Dual-Objective Scheduling of Rescue Vehicles to Distinguish Forest Fires via Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization Combined Algorithm

In the no-idle flowshop, machines cannot be idle after finishing one job and before starting the next one. Therefore, start times of jobs must be delayed to guarantee this constraint. In practice machines show this behavior as it might be technically unfeasible or uneconomical to stop a machine in between jobs. This has important ramifications in the modern industry including fiber glass processing, foundries, production of integrated circuits and the steel making industry, among others. However, to assume that all machines in the shop have this no-idle constraint is not realistic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the mixed no-idle extension where only some machines have the no-idle constraint. We present a mixed integer programming model for this new problem and the equations to calculate the makespan. We also propose a set of formulas to accelerate the calculation of insertions that is used both in heuristics as well as in the local search procedures. An effective iterated greedy (IG) algorithm is proposed. We use an NEH-based heuristic to construct a high quality initial solution. A local search using the proposed accelerations is employed to emphasize intensification and exploration in the IG. A new destruction and construction procedure is also shown. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we present several adaptations of other well-known and recent metaheuristics for the problem and conduct a comprehensive set of computational and statistical experiments with a total of 1750 instances. The results show that the proposed IG algorithm outperforms existing methods in the no-idle and in the mixed no-idle scenarios by a significant margin.

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Guanlong Deng

Papers

A hybrid discrete differential evolution algorithm for the no-idle permutation flow shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion