EOS: a parallel, self-adaptive, multi-population evolutionary algorithm for constrained global optimization

This paper presents the main characteristics of the evolutionary optimization code named EOS, Evolutionary Optimization at Sapienza, and its successful application to challenging, real-world space trajectory optimization problems. EOS is a global optimization algorithm for constrained and unconstrained problems of real-valued variables. It implements a number of improvements to the well-known Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, namely, a self-adaptation of the control parameters, an epidemic mechanism, a clustering technique, an arepsilon-constrained method to deal with nonlinear constraints, and a synchronous island-model to handle multiple populations in parallel. The results reported prove that EOS is capable of achieving increased performance compared to state-of-the-art single-population self-adaptive DE algorithms when applied to high-dimensional or highly-constrained space trajectory optimization problems.