In this paper, a new Differential Evolution (DE) that has multiple populations, or islands, is proposed. The proposed DE is called Structured Differential Evolution (StDE). In order to generate a new individual from the current population, various characteristic strategies have been proposed for DE. However, the performances of these strategies depend on the kind of the optimization problem. The proposed StDE uses different strategies in respective islands. Therefore, it can be expected that the proposed StDE is effective for a wide range of optimization problems. Although various networks topologies among islands are reported for island-based evolutionary algorithms, the most popular ones, namely the ring network and the torus network, are employed by StDE. Furthermore, in order to enhance the performance of proposed StDE, various migration policies are examined in two kinds of networks though a variety of benchmark problems.
