Linear antenna array synthesis using fitness-adaptive differential evolution algorithm

Design of non-uniform linear antenna arrays is one of the most important electromagnetic optimization problems of current interest. In this article, an adaptive Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm has been used to optimize the spacing between the elements of the linear array to produce a radiation pattern with minimum side lobe level and null placement control. DE is arguably one of the best real parameter optimizers of current interest takes very few control parameters and is easy to implement in any programming language. In this study two very simple adaptation schemes are used to regulate the control parameters F and Cr, upon which the performance of DE is critically dependent. The adaptation schemes are based on the objective function values of the target vectors and donor vectors. The adaptive DE-variant has been used to solve three difficult instances of the design problem and the optimization goal in each example is easily achieved. The results of the proposed algorithm have been shown to meet or beat the recently published results obtained using other state-of-the-art metaheuristics like the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Memetic Algorithms (MA), and Tabu Search (TS) in a statistically meaningful way.