I2DE - Improved Interval Differential Evolution for Numerical Constrained Global Optimization.

Several hybrid approaches have been proposed to solve numerical constrained optimization problems. In this paper we present an Improved Interval Differential Evolution (I2DE) that uses structural information of the instance during the optimization process. We extend the math operations supported by a multi-interval core implementation that allows pruning infeasible solutions by using local consistency techniques and a backtrack-free local search. Furthermore, we propose a reformulation of interval evolutionary mutation strategies. A comprehensive experimental analysis is conducted over COCONUT and CEC2018 competition benchmarks and indicates that the hybridization between metaheuristics and constraint programming significantly improves the quality of the solutions. The experimental evaluation shows that our black-box version of I2DE outperformed several state-of-the-art solvers.