Hybrid Quantum Differential Evolution

The increasing interest, in the last two decades, of evolutionary computation community in the combination of quantum computing and evolutionary computing, has led to the definition of a novel class of quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms which exploit the concepts of quantum bits and quantum gates with the aim of improving the efficiency of current optimization methods. In this paper, a new method which hybridizes differential evolution with quantum computing is proposed. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase, it performs a new quantum-inspired evolutionary method until it does not get stuck into a local optimum, then, in the second phase, it runs differential evolution by using as initial population that obtained at the end of the first phase. Experiments on classical benchmark functions show that the hybridization outperforms standard methods by sensibly improving the fitness value and speeding up the convergence process.