Ali Wagdy Mohamed

This paper proposes a nonlinear Goal Programming Model (GPM) for solving the problem of admission capacity planning in academic universities. Many factors of university admission capacity planning have been taken into consideration among which are number of admitted students in the past years, total population in the country, number of graduates from secondary schools, desired ratios of specific specialties, faculty-to-students ratio, and the past number of graduates. The proposed model is general and has been tested at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the work aims to achieve the key objectives of a five-year development plan in addition to a 25-year future plan (AAFAQ) for universities education in the Kingdom. Based on the results of this test, the proposed GPM with a modified differential evolution algorithm has approved an ability to solve general admission capacity planning problem in terms of high quality, rapid convergence speed, efficiency, and robustness.

This paper proposes a nonlinear integer goal programming model (NIGPM) for solving the general problem of admission capacity planning in a country as a whole. The work aims to satisfy most of the required key objectives of a country related to the enrollment problem for higher education. The system general outlines are developed along with the solution methodology for application to the time horizon in a given plan. The up-to-date data for Saudi Arabia is used as a case study and a novel evolutionary algorithm based on modified differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to solve the complexity of the NIGPM generated for different goal priorities. The experimental results presented in this paper show their effectiveness in solving the admission capacity for higher education in terms of final solution quality and robustness.

This paper presents Differential Evolution algorithm for solving high-dimensional optimization problems over continuous space. The proposed algorithm, namely, ANDE, introduces a new triangular mutation rule based on the convex combination vector of the triplet defined by the three randomly chosen vectors and the difference vectors between the best, better, and the worst individuals among the three randomly selected vectors. The mutation rule is combined with the basic mutation strategy DE/rand/1/bin, where the new triangular mutation rule is applied with the probability of 2/3 since it has both exploration ability and exploitation tendency. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-adaptive scheme for gradual change of the values of the crossover rate that can excellently benefit from the past experience of the individuals in the search space during evolution process which in turn can considerably balance the common trade-off between the population diversity and convergence speed. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on the 20 standard high-dimensional benchmark numerical optimization problems for the IEEE CEC-2010 Special Session and Competition on Large Scale Global Optimization. The comparison results between ANDE and its versions and the other seven state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms that were all tested on this test suite indicate that the proposed algorithm and its two versions are highly competitive algorithms for solving large scale global optimization problems.

In this paper, an efficient modified Differential Evolution algorithm, named EMDE, is proposed for solving constrained non-linear integer and mixed-integer global optimization problems. In the proposed algorithm, new triangular mutation rule based on the convex combination vector of the triplet defined by the three randomly chosen vectors and the difference vectors between the best,better and the worst individuals among the three randomly selected vectors is introduced. The proposed novel approach to mutation operator is shown to enhance the global and local search capabilities and to increase the convergence speed of the new algorithm compared with basic DE. EMDE uses Deb’s constraint handling technique based on feasibility and the sum of constraints violations without any additional parameters. In order to evaluate and analyze the performance of EMDE, Numerical experiments on a set of 18 test problems with different features, including a comparison with basic DE and four state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms are executed. Experimental results indicate that in terms of robustness, stability and efficiency, EMDE is significantly better than other five algorithms in solving these test problems. Furthermore, EMDE exhibits good performance in solving two high-dimensional problems, and it finds better solutions than the known ones. Hence, EMDE is superior to the compared algorithms.

This paper presents enhanced adaptive differential evolution (EADE) algorithm for solving high-dimensional optimization problems over continuous space. To utilize the information of good and bad vectors in the DE population, the proposed algorithm introduces a new mutation rule. It uses two random chosen vectors of the top and bottom 100p% individuals in the current population of size NP, while the third vector is selected randomly from the middle [NP-2(100p%)] individuals. The mutation rule is combined with the basic mutation strategy DE/rand/1/bin, where the only one of the two mutation rules is applied with the probability of 0.5. This new mutation scheme helps to maintain effectively the balance between the global exploration and local exploitation abilities for searching process of the DE. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-adaptive scheme for gradual change of the values of the crossover rate that can excellently benefit from the past experience of the individuals in the search space during evolution process which, in turn, can considerably balance the common trade-off between the population diversity and convergence speed. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on the 7 and 20 standard high-dimensional benchmark numerical optimization problems for both the IEEE CEC-2008 and the IEEE CEC-2010 Special Session and Competition on Large-Scale Global Optimization. The comparison results between EADE and its version and the other state-of-art algorithms that were all tested on these test suites indicate that the proposed algorithm and its version are highly competitive algorithms for solving large-scale global optimization problems.

This paper presents a new approach to Differential Evolution algorithm for solving stochastic programming problems, named DESP. The proposed algorithm introduces a new triangular mutation rule based on the convex combination vector of the triangle and the difference vector between the best and the worst individuals among the three randomly selected vectors. The proposed novel approach to mutation operator is shown to enhance the global and local search capabilities and to increase the convergence speed of the new algorithm compared with conventional DE. DESP uses Deb’s constraint handling technique based on feasibility and the sum of constraint violations without any additional parameters. Besides, a new dynamic tolerance technique to handle equality constraints is also adopted. Two models of stochastic programming (SP) problems are considered: Linear Stochastic Fractional Programming Problems and Multi-objective Stochastic Linear Programming Problems. The comparison results between the DESP and basic DE, basic particle swarm optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the available results from where it is indicated that the proposed DESP algorithm is competitive with, and in some cases superior to, other algorithms in terms of final solution quality, efficiency and robustness of the considered problems in comparison with the quoted results in the literature.

Adaptive guided differential evolution algorithm (AGDE) is a DE algorithm that utilizes the information of good and bad vectors in the population, it introduced a novel mutation rule in order to balance effectively the exploration and exploitation tradeoffs. It divided the population into three clusters (best, better and worst) with sizes 100p%, NP-2 * 100p% and 100p% respectively. Where p is the proportion of the partition with respect to the total number of individuals in the population (NP). AGDE selects three random individuals, one of each partition to implement the mutation process. Besides, a novel adaptation scheme was proposed in order to update the value of crossover rate without previous knowledge about the characteristics of the problems. This paper introduces enhanced AGDE (EAGDE) with non-linear population size reduction, which gradually decreases the population size according to a non-linear function. Moreover, a newly developed rule developed to determine the initial population size, that is related to the dimensionality of the problems.

This paper introduces a novel differential evolution (DE) algorithm for solving constrained engineering optimization problems called (NDE). The key idea of the proposed NDE is the use of new triangular mutation rule. It is based on the convex combination vector of the triplet defined by the three randomly chosen vectors and the difference vectors between the best, better and the worst individuals among the three randomly selected vectors. The main purpose of the new approach to triangular mutation operator is the search for better balance between the global exploration ability and the local exploitation tendency as well as enhancing the convergence rate of the algorithm through the optimization process. In order to evaluate and analyze the performance of NDE, numerical experiments on three sets of test problems with different features, including a comparison with thirty state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms, are executed where 24 well-known benchmark test functions presented in CEC’2006, five widely used constrained engineering design problems and five constrained mechanical design problems from the literature are utilized. The results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive with, and in some cases superior to, the compared ones in terms of the quality, efficiency and robustness of the obtained final solutions.

This paper presents enhanced fitness-adaptive differential evolution algorithm with novel mutation (EFADE) for solving global numerical optimization problems over continuous space. A new triangular mutation operator is introduced. It is based on the convex combination vector of the triplet defined by the three randomly chosen vectors and the difference vectors between the best, better and the worst individuals among the three randomly selected vectors. Triangular mutation operator helps the search for better balance between the global exploration ability and the local exploitation tendency as well as enhancing the convergence rate of the algorithm through the optimization process. Besides, two novel, effective adaptation schemes are used to update the control parameters to appropriate values without either extra parameters or prior knowledge of the characteristics of the optimization problem. In order to verify and analyze the performance of EFADE, numerical experiments on a set of 28 test problems from the CEC2013 benchmark for 10, 30 and 50 dimensions, including a comparison with 12 recent DE-based algorithms and six recent evolutionary algorithms, are executed. Experimental results indicate that in terms of robustness, stability and quality of the solution obtained, EFADE is significantly better than, or at least comparable to state-of-the-art approaches with outstanding performance.

This paper presents adaptive guided differential evolution algorithm (AGDE) for solving global numerical optimization problems over continuous space. In order to utilize the information of good and bad vectors in the DE population, the proposed algorithm introduces a new mutation rule. It uses two random chosen vectors of the top and the bottom 100p% individuals in the current population of size NP while the third vector is selected randomly from the middle [NP-2(100p %)] individuals. This new mutation scheme helps maintain effectively the balance between the global exploration and local exploitation abilities for searching process of the DE. Besides, a novel and effective adaptation scheme is used to update the values of the crossover rate to appropriate values without either extra parameters or prior knowledge of the characteristics of the optimization problem. In order to verify and analyze the performance of AGDE, Numerical experiments on a set of 28 test problems from the CEC2013 benchmark for 10, 30, and 50 dimensions, including a comparison with classical DE schemes and some recent evolutionary algorithms are executed. Experimental results indicate that in terms of robustness, stability and quality of the solution obtained, AGDE is significantly better than, or at least comparable to state-of-the-art approaches.

The performance of Differential Evolution is significantly affected by the mutation scheme, which attracts many researchers to develop and enhance the mutation scheme in DE. In this article, the authors introduce an enhanced DE algorithm (EDDE) that utilizes the information given by good individuals and bad individuals in the population. The new mutation scheme maintains effectively the exploration/exploitation balance. Numerical experiments are conducted on 24 test problems presented in CEC'2006, and five constrained engineering problems from the literature for verifying and analyzing the performance of EDDE. The presented algorithm showed competitiveness in some cases and superiority in other cases in terms of robustness, efficiency and quality the of the results.

During the last decade, large-scale global optimization has been one of the active research fields. Optimization algorithms are affected by the curse of dimensionality associated with this kind of complex problems. To solve this problem, a new memetic framework for solving large-scale global optimization problems is proposed in this paper. In the proposed framework, success history-based differential evolution with linear population size reduction and semi-parameter adaptation (LSHADE-SPA) is used for global exploration, while a modified version of multiple trajectory search is used for local exploitation. The framework introduced in this paper is further enhanced by the concept of divide and conquer, where the dimensions are randomly divided into groups, and each group is solved separately. The proposed framework is evaluated using IEEE CEC2010 and the IEEE CEC2013 benchmarks designed for large-scale global optimization. The comparison results between our framework and other state-of-the-art algorithms indicate that our proposed framework is competitive in solving large-scale global optimization problems.