SHADE with Iterative Local Search for Large-Scale Global Optimization

Global optimization is a very important topic in research due to its wide applications in many real-world problems in science and engineering. Among optimization problems, dimensionality is one of the most crucial issues that increases the difficulty of the optimization process. Thus, Large-Scale Global Optimization, optimization with a great number of variables, arises as a field that is getting an increasing interest. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid algorithm especially designed to tackle this type of optimization problems. The proposal combines, in a iterative way, a modern Differential Evolution algorithm with one local search method chosen from a set of different search methods. The selection of the local search method is dynamic and takes into account the improvement obtained by each of them in the previous intensification phase, to identify the most adequate in each case for the problem. Experiments are carried out using the CEC’2013 Large-Scale Global Optimization benchmark, and the proposal is compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, showing that the synergy among the different components of our proposal leads to better and more robust results than more complex algorithms. In particular, it improves the results of the current winner of previous Large-Scale Global Optimization competitions, Multiple Offspring Sampling, MOS, obtaining very good results, especially in the most difficult problems.