A Distributed Multiple Populations Framework for Evolutionary Algorithm in Solving Dynamic Optimization Problems

Aiming to dynamic optimization problems (DOPs), this paper develops a novel general distributed multiple populations (DMP) framework for evolutionary algorithms (EAs). DMP employs six strategies designed in three levels (i.e., population-level, subpopulation-level, and individual-level) to deal with different kinds of DOPs. First, the population-level subpopulation division estimation strategy in initialization phase rationally divides the whole population into several subpopulations to explore distinct subareas of search space sufficiently. Then, during the steady evolutionary process, diversity preservation in individual-level and population-level accelerates the responsiveness of the whole population to a new landscape, while subpopulation-level self-learning of elitist individuals promotes the exploitation of promising areas. Moreover, in subpopulation-level, the archive quality assurance technique avoids repeat exploring the same peaks by storing the locations of different peaks with low redundancy. When landscape variation occurs, in population-level, historical information containing excellent evolutionary pattern is recorded to guide the population evolution better in the new environment. DMP framework is easy to implement in various EAs due to its well generality and independence about operators and parameters of the embedded algorithm. Four DMP-EAs are accomplished in this paper whose basic algorithms are particle swarm optimization (PSO) and differential evolution (DE) with different settings. The performance of the four proposed DMP-EAs is evaluated on all the widely used complex DOP benchmarks from CEC 2009. The testing results indicate that the DMP-EAs generally significantly outperform many state-of-the-art dynamic EAs (DEAs) on most of DOP benchmarks.