A comparative performance analysis of Differential Evolution and Dynamic Differential Evolution variants

In this paper we present an empirical, comparative performance, analysis of fourteen variants of Differential Evolution (DE) and Dynamic Differential Evolution (DDE) algorithms to solve unconstrained global optimization problems. The aim is to compare DDE, which employs a dynamic evolution mechanism, against DE and to identify the competitive variants which perform reasonably well on problems with different features. The fourteen variants of DE and DDE are benchmarked on 6 test functions grouped by features - unimodal separable, unimodal nonseparable, multimodal separable and multimodal non-separable. The analysis identifies the competitive variants and shows that DDE variants consistently outperform their classical counter parts.