Abstracts This study presents a comprehensive comparison of two population-based metaheuristic algorithms, differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), applied to the optimization of mechanical component design under both single-objective and multi-objective formulations. The study’s novelty lies in its unified evaluation framework, which benchmarks DE and PSO across a set of standardized mechanical design problems and further extends to multi-objective variants (MODE and MOPSO) for full Pareto front analysis. In the single-objective case, both algorithms achieved solutions equal to or better than the best-known results in the literature. PSO generally provided superior solutions and faster convergence, while DE exhibited advantages in computational efficiency and solution stability. In the multi-objective setting, MODE produced broader and more diverse Pareto fronts with higher hypervolume scores, whereas MOPSO delivered competitive results but tended to concentrate around central trade-offs. Importantly, this study provides one of the first systematic comparisons of convergence behavior in single-objective optimization and Pareto front quality through hypervolume analysis in multi-objective mechanical design problems, offering a deeper understanding of convergence–diversity performance across both optimization settings. The findings highlight PSO’s strength in rapid exploration and DE’s robustness in broad trade-off discovery, providing practical guidance for selecting metaheuristic algorithms in engineering design optimization.
Nakkiew et al. (Thu,) studied this question.