An adaptive fuzzy penalty method for constrained evolutionary optimization

Penalty function is well-known for constrained evolutionary optimization. An open question in the penalty function is how to tune the penalty coefficient. This paper proposes an adaptive fuzzy penalty method to address this issue, where the coefficient is adjusted at both the individual level and the population level. At the individual level, each individual chooses a penalty coefficient from a predefined domain according to some fuzzy rules. At the population level, the domain of the crisp output is adjusted adaptively by using population information. To enhance the population diversity, an effective mutation scheme is developed. Due to its numerous merits, differential evolution is used to design a search algorithm. By the above processes, a constrained optimization evolutionary algorithm called AFPDE is proposed. Since the objective function value and the degree of constraint violation are normalized, AFPDE is less problem-dependent than the seminal work of the fuzzy penalty method. AFPDE introduces a lower penalty value in the early stage of AFPDE while a higher one in the later stage. Thus, it can escape local optima in the infeasible region. Experiments on three well-known benchmark test sets and two mechanical design problems validate that AFPDE is competitive.