Abstract
This paper compares the binomial crossover used in the Differential Evolution with a variant named the contiguous binomial crossover. In the latter, a contiguous block of variables is used for selecting which variables are exchanged, in a fashion similar to that of the exponential crossover, allowing to using a single, normally-distributed random number to decide the number of exchanged variables. Experimental results show that this variant of the binomial crossover exhibits in general similar or better performance than the original one, and allows to increase significantly the execution speed of the Differential Evolution, especially in higher dimension problems.