Optimization, differential evolution, population diversity, experimental comparison, CEC2014 benchmark set.

A new mechanism for the adaptation of population size in differential evolution (DE) is described and applied to CEC 2014 test suite. The adaptive mechanism is based on linear reduction of the population diversity and enables both decreasing and increasing the population size during the search. The efficiency of DE variants with and without this adaptive mechanism is compared. Moreover, this new mechanism is also compared with the linear reduction of population size used in L-SHADE and its successful successors. The results of the comparison demonstrate the benefit from the new adaptive mechanism to the algorithm efficiency in more than a half of test problems while the deterioration of efficiency occurs rarely.