A Framework to Handle Multi-modal Multi-objective Optimization in Decomposition-based Evolutionary Algorithms
This addresses a specific bottleneck in evolutionary algorithms for optimization tasks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of poor performance in decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms for multi-modal multi-objective optimization by proposing a framework with assignment, deletion, and addition operations to maintain solution space diversity, resulting in clearly better performance than original algorithms on various test problems.
Multi-modal multi-objective optimization is to locate (almost) equivalent Pareto optimal solutions as many as possible. While decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms have good performance for multi-objective optimization, they are likely to perform poorly for multi-modal multi-objective optimization due to the lack of mechanisms to maintain the solution space diversity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a framework to improve the performance of decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms for multi-modal multi-objective optimization. Our framework is based on three operations: assignment, deletion, and addition operations. One or more individuals can be assigned to the same subproblem to handle multiple equivalent solutions. In each iteration, a child is assigned to a subproblem based on its objective vector, i.e., its location in the objective space. The child is compared with its neighbors in the solution space assigned to the same subproblem. The performance of improved versions of six decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms by our framework is evaluated on various test problems regarding the number of objectives, decision variables, and equivalent Pareto optimal solution sets. Results show that the improved versions perform clearly better than their original algorithms.