SummaryThis paper presents a parallel distributed model for the Differential Evolution algorithm. The proposed model, Hierarchical Island‐Based Model for Differential Evolution, follows a double‐hierarchy master‐worker scheme and offers two parallelism levels. In this proposal, the processes are associated with certain cooperation hierarchy, allowing them to explore in a more comprehensive way the search space of the problem at hand. A comparative study with other algorithms from the state of art is also presented. The results show that Hierachical Island‐Based Model for Differential Evolution is a flexible model and achieves good performance in terms of results quality and computing time.