A Differential Evolution Algorithm with Constraint Sequencing

The presence of constraints is known to affect the performance of all optimization algorithms. This paper proposes a novel approach of constraint handling, wherein for every solution, the evaluation of the constraints follow a predefined sequence. Furthermore, for any solution, such an evaluation is aborted whenever any constraint in the sequence is violated. The benefits of such a sequencing approach is illustrated using an example before comparing its performance with three existing state of the art differential evolution algorithms on 11 commonly studied constrained optimization benchmark problems. The results clearly highlight that the proposed algorithm has a faster rate of convergence and a better performance over existing state of the art DEs.