Boosting Cooperative Coevolution for Large Scale Optimization with a Fine-Grained Computation Resource Allocation Strategy
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in optimization algorithms for researchers and practitioners dealing with large-scale problems, offering an incremental but effective enhancement to cooperative coevolution methods.
The paper tackles the inefficient computation resource allocation in cooperative coevolution for large-scale optimization by proposing a fine-grained strategy (FCRA) that models the allocation mathematically and selects subproblems based on estimated contributions, resulting in significant performance improvements over existing strategies on benchmark suites.
Cooperative coevolution (CC) has shown great potential in solving large scale optimization problems (LSOPs). However, traditional CC algorithms often waste part of computation resource (CR) as they equally allocate CR among all the subproblems. The recently developed contribution-based CC (CBCC) algorithms improve the traditional ones to a certain extent by adaptively allocating CR according to some heuristic rules. Different from existing works, this study explicitly constructs a mathematical model for the CR allocation (CRA) problem in CC and proposes a novel fine-grained CRA (FCRA) strategy by fully considering both the theoretically optimal solution of the CRA model and the evolution characteristics of CC. FCRA takes a single iteration as a basic CRA unit and always selects the subproblem which is most likely to make the largest contribution to the total fitness improvement to undergo a new iteration, where the contribution of a subproblem at a new iteration is estimated according to its current contribution, current evolution status as well as the estimation for its current contribution. We verified the efficiency of FCRA by combining it with SHADE which is an excellent differential evolution variant but has never been employed in the CC framework. Experimental results on two benchmark suites for LSOPs demonstrate that FCRA significantly outperforms existing CRA strategies and the resultant CC algorithm is highly competitive in solving LSOPs.