Dichotomous Binary Differential Evolution for Knapsack Problems

Differential evolution (DE) is one of the most popular and powerful evolutionary algorithms for the real-parameter global continuous optimization problems. However, how to adapt into combinatorial optimization problems without sacrificing the original evolution mechanism of DE is harder work to the researchers to design an efficient binary differential evolution (BDE). To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel BDE based on dichotomous mechanism for knapsack problems, called DBDE, in which two new proposed methods (i.e., dichotomous mutation and dichotomous crossover) are employed. DBDE almost has any difference with original DE and no additional module or computation has been introduced. The experimental studies have been conducted on a suite of 0-1 knapsack problems and multidimensional knapsack problems. Experimental results have verified the quality and effectiveness of DBDE. Comparison with three state-of-the-art BDE variants and other two state-of-the-art binary particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms has proved that DBDE is a new competitive algorithm.