Differential Evolution Using Smaller Population

As one of the popular evolutionary algorithms, differential evolution (DE) shows outstanding convergence rate on continuous optimization problems. But prematurity probably still occurs in classical DE when using relatively small population, which is discussed in this paper. Considering that large population may significantly raise the computational effort, we propose a modified DE using smaller population (DESP) by introducing extra disturbance to its mutation operation. In addition, an adaptive adjustment scheme is designed to control the disturbance intensity according to the improvement during the evolution. To test the performance of DESP, two groups of experiments are conducted. The results show that DESP outperforms DE in terms of convergence rate and accuracy.