Ensemble and Arithmetic Recombination-Based Speciation Differential Evolution for Multimodal Optimization

Multimodal optimization problems consists of multiple equal or comparable spatially distributed solutions. Niching and clustering differential evolution (DE) techniques have been demonstrated to be highly effective for solving such problems. The key challenge in the speciation niching technique is to balance between local solution exploitation and global exploration. Our proposal enhances exploration by applying arithmetic recombination with speciation and improves exploitation of individual peaks by applying neighborhood mutation with ensemble strategies. Our novel algorithm, called ensemble and arithmetic recombination-based speciation DE, is shown to either outperform or perform comparably to the state-of-the-art algorithms on 29 common multimodal benchmark problems. Comparable performance is observed only when some problems are solved perfectly by the algorithms in the literature.