Learning Adaptive Evolutionary Computation for Solving Multi-Objective Optimization Problems
This work addresses parameter tuning inefficiencies for researchers and practitioners in optimization, though it is incremental as it combines existing methods.
The paper tackles the computational expense of parameter tuning in multi-objective evolutionary algorithms by integrating them with deep reinforcement learning for adaptive parameter control, demonstrating improved solution quality and computation time on benchmark and real-world warehouse problems, with the learned policy being transferable without retraining.
Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are widely used to solve multi-objective optimization problems. The algorithms rely on setting appropriate parameters to find good solutions. However, this parameter tuning could be very computationally expensive in solving non-trial (combinatorial) optimization problems. This paper proposes a framework that integrates MOEAs with adaptive parameter control using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The DRL policy is trained to adaptively set the values that dictate the intensity and probability of mutation for solutions during optimization. We test the proposed approach with a simple benchmark problem and a real-world, complex warehouse design and control problem. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our method in terms of solution quality and computation time to reach good solutions. In addition, we show the learned policy is transferable, i.e., the policy trained on a simple benchmark problem can be directly applied to solve the complex warehouse optimization problem, effectively, without the need for retraining.