A multi-population cultural algorithm with adaptive diversity preservation and its application in ammonia synthesis process

A multi-population cultural differential evolution (MCDE) algorithm is proposed. Each of the populations is managed by its private cultural differential evolution algorithm, in which a center individual is introduced into the belief space and selection function follows a new method to select the offspring for the next generation. To accelerate the convergence speed, the populations exchange their knowledge with each other every given generations. An adaptive mechanism of population diversity preservation is put forward to prevent the populations from being trapped in local optima. In the adaptive mechanism, the idea of culture fusion between populations is used to know the convergence status, so that the diversity of populations is kept along the evolutionary process. The performance evaluation on MCDE using eleven constrained optimization problems shows that MCDE is a competitive approach. MCDE is further applied to a practical optimization problem in an ammonia synthesis system with the objective to maximize the net value of ammonia. The results achieved by MCDE are compared with those by two traditional differential evolution algorithms, which indicate that MCDE has more excellent performance and better effectiveness.