Differential evolution, Population diversity,Acceptable interval, Experimental comparison, Real-world problems

In this paper, a newly proposed setting of a diversity-based adaptive mechanism of population size setting in differential evolution (DE) is experimentally studied. Seven state-of-the-art adaptive DE variants and classic DE are used in the experiments where 22 real-world problems are solved. The obtained results are assessed by statistical tests. The diversity-based approach often performs substantially better compared with the original fixed population size setting or linearly decreasing population size. A newly proposed setting of the control parameter performs at least the same or better than the original setting.