Dynamic Tracking with Fuzzy Rules for Evolutionary Dynamic Constrained Optimization

Nature-inspired population-based stochastic search algorithms (SSA) have demonstrated effectiveness in solving many real-world dynamic optimization problems (DOPs), such as dynamic optimal power flow (DOPF) problems. The basic idea of solving DOPs using SSAs is to “track the moving optima”, rather than solving the changed problems from scratch. Its hidden assumption is that the problems are slightly changed in general, and it is expected that the search process can be accelerated by learning from past search experiences. However, the hidden assumption that the current search process can always benefit from previous search experiences might not be true for certain cases. For example, if the current problem is not similar to any of its previous problems, the historical solutions might not be helpful for the current search. To reduce such negative transfer, the following issues are worthy of study: how to choose which historical problems to learn from, and how to determine the degree of learning from historical problems. To solve the above problems, we propose a dynamic processing framework based on fuzzy rules from the perspective of incorporating human knowledge for optima tracking. The experimental results on the DOPF problems show that the SSA with the proposed optima tracking strategy outperforms other comparative algorithms. We open up the code and data of our algorithm44https://github.com/DMiC-Lab-HFUT/SMDE-Transfer.