This paper first proposes a novel concept of differential evolution (DE) with an automatic parameter adjustment that controls its search situation to be a promising situation by the error feedback. It is called feedback‐controlled differential evolution (FCDE), whose adjustment mechanism consists of three parts: Evaluator, Referencer, and Controller. Evaluator calculates an evaluation index which measures the search situation. Referencer generates a reference index being a target of the evaluation index which corresponds to a promising situation. Controller operates the parameters to make the evaluation index follow the reference index using its error feedback. Further, this paper realizes a method in FCDE for a typical DE called “DE/best/1/bin" by designing the three parts. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed through various computational experiments from the viewpoints of controllability and performance. © 2015 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.