An Artificial Decision Maker for Comparing Reference Point Based Interactive Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Methods

Author(s):  
Bekir Afsar ◽  
Kaisa Miettinen ◽  
Ana B. Ruiz
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Bekir Afsar ◽  
Kaisa Miettinen ◽  
Francisco Ruiz

Interactive methods are useful decision-making tools for multiobjective optimization problems, because they allow a decision-maker to provide her/his preference information iteratively in a comfortable way at the same time as (s)he learns about all different aspects of the problem. A wide variety of interactive methods is nowadays available, and they differ from each other in both technical aspects and type of preference information employed. Therefore, assessing the performance of interactive methods can help users to choose the most appropriate one for a given problem. This is a challenging task, which has been tackled from different perspectives in the published literature. We present a bibliographic survey of papers where interactive multiobjective optimization methods have been assessed (either individually or compared to other methods). Besides other features, we collect information about the type of decision-maker involved (utility or value functions, artificial or human decision-maker), the type of preference information provided, and aspects of interactive methods that were somehow measured. Based on the survey and on our own experiences, we identify a series of desirable properties of interactive methods that we believe should be assessed.


Author(s):  
Bekir Afsar ◽  
Ana B. Ruiz ◽  
Kaisa Miettinen

AbstractSolving multiobjective optimization problems with interactive methods enables a decision maker with domain expertise to direct the search for the most preferred trade-offs with preference information and learn about the problem. There are different interactive methods, and it is important to compare them and find the best-suited one for solving the problem in question. Comparisons with real decision makers are expensive, and artificial decision makers (ADMs) have been proposed to simulate humans in basic testing before involving real decision makers. Existing ADMs only consider one type of preference information. In this paper, we propose ADM-II, which is tailored to assess several interactive evolutionary methods and is able to handle different types of preference information. We consider two phases of interactive solution processes, i.e., learning and decision phases separately, so that the proposed ADM-II generates preference information in different ways in each of them to reflect the nature of the phases. We demonstrate how ADM-II can be applied with different methods and problems. We also propose an indicator to assess and compare the performance of interactive evolutionary methods.


2010 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Branke ◽  
S. Greco ◽  
R. Słowiński ◽  
P. Zielniewicz

Interactive evolutionary multiobjective optimization driven by robust ordinal regressionThis paper presents the Necessary-preference-enhanced Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimizer (NEMO), which combines an evolutionary multiobjective optimization with robust ordinal regression within an interactive procedure. In the course of NEMO, the decision maker is asked to express preferences by simply comparing some pairs of solutions in the current population. The whole set of additive value functions compatible with this preference information is used within a properly modified version of the evolutionary multiobjective optimization technique NSGA-II in order to focus the search towards solutions satisfying the preferences of the decision maker. This allows to speed up convergence to the most preferred region of the Pareto-front.


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