scholarly journals Evolutionary Computation for Large-scale Multi-objective Optimization: A Decade of Progresses

Author(s):  
Wen-Jing Hong ◽  
Peng Yang ◽  
Ke Tang

AbstractLarge-scale multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) that involve a large number of decision variables, have emerged from many real-world applications. While evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely acknowledged as a mainstream method for MOPs, most research progress and successful applications of EAs have been restricted to MOPs with small-scale decision variables. More recently, it has been reported that traditional multi-objective EAs (MOEAs) suffer severe deterioration with the increase of decision variables. As a result, and motivated by the emergence of real-world large-scale MOPs, investigation of MOEAs in this aspect has attracted much more attention in the past decade. This paper reviews the progress of evolutionary computation for large-scale multi-objective optimization from two angles. From the key difficulties of the large-scale MOPs, the scalability analysis is discussed by focusing on the performance of existing MOEAs and the challenges induced by the increase of the number of decision variables. From the perspective of methodology, the large-scale MOEAs are categorized into three classes and introduced respectively: divide and conquer based, dimensionality reduction based and enhanced search-based approaches. Several future research directions are also discussed.

Author(s):  
Yajie Zhang ◽  
Ye Tian ◽  
Xingyi Zhang

AbstractSparse large-scale multi-objective optimization problems (LSMOPs) widely exist in real-world applications, which have the properties of involving a large number of decision variables and sparse Pareto optimal solutions, i.e., most decision variables of these solutions are zero. In recent years, sparse LSMOPs have attracted increasing attentions in the evolutionary computation community. However, all the recently tailored algorithms for sparse LSMOPs put the sparsity detection and maintenance in the first place, where the nonzero variables can hardly be optimized sufficiently within a limited budget of function evaluations. To address this issue, this paper proposes to enhance the connection between real variables and binary variables within the two-layer encoding scheme with the assistance of variable grouping techniques. In this way, more efforts can be devoted to the real part of nonzero variables, achieving the balance between sparsity maintenance and variable optimization. According to the experimental results on eight benchmark problems and three real-world applications, the proposed algorithm is superior over existing state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms for sparse LSMOPs.


2022 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Ye Tian ◽  
Langchun Si ◽  
Xingyi Zhang ◽  
Ran Cheng ◽  
Cheng He ◽  
...  

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have shown promising performance in solving various optimization problems, but their performance may deteriorate drastically when tackling problems containing a large number of decision variables. In recent years, much effort been devoted to addressing the challenges brought by large-scale multi-objective optimization problems. This article presents a comprehensive survey of stat-of-the-art MOEAs for solving large-scale multi-objective optimization problems. We start with a categorization of these MOEAs into decision variable grouping based, decision space reduction based, and novel search strategy based MOEAs, discussing their strengths and weaknesses. Then, we review the benchmark problems for performance assessment and a few important and emerging applications of MOEAs for large-scale multi-objective optimization. Last, we discuss some remaining challenges and future research directions of evolutionary large-scale multi-objective optimization.


Author(s):  
Amarjeet Prajapati

AbstractOver the past 2 decades, several multi-objective optimizers (MOOs) have been proposed to address the different aspects of multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). Unfortunately, it has been observed that many of MOOs experiences performance degradation when applied over MOPs having a large number of decision variables and objective functions. Specially, the performance of MOOs rapidly decreases when the number of decision variables and objective functions increases by more than a hundred and three, respectively. To address the challenges caused by such special case of MOPs, some large-scale multi-objective optimization optimizers (L-MuOOs) and large-scale many-objective optimization optimizers (L-MaOOs) have been developed in the literature. Even after vast development in the direction of L-MuOOs and L-MaOOs, the supremacy of these optimizers has not been tested on real-world optimization problems containing a large number of decision variables and objectives such as large-scale many-objective software clustering problems (L-MaSCPs). In this study, the performance of nine L-MuOOs and L-MaOOs (i.e., S3-CMA-ES, LMOSCO, LSMOF, LMEA, IDMOPSO, ADC-MaOO, NSGA-III, H-RVEA, and DREA) is evaluated and compared over five L-MaSCPs in terms of IGD, Hypervolume, and MQ metrics. The experimentation results show that the S3-CMA-ES and LMOSCO perform better compared to the LSMOF, LMEA, IDMOPSO, ADC-MaOO, NSGA-III, H-RVEA, and DREA in most of the cases. The LSMOF, LMEA, IDMOPSO, ADC-MaOO, NSGA-III, and DREA, are the average performer, and H-RVEA is the worst performer.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Handing Wang ◽  
Licheng Jiao ◽  
Ronghua Shang ◽  
Shan He ◽  
Fang Liu

There can be a complicated mapping relation between decision variables and objective functions in multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). It is uncommon that decision variables influence objective functions equally. Decision variables act differently in different objective functions. Hence, often, the mapping relation is unbalanced, which causes some redundancy during the search in a decision space. In response to this scenario, we propose a novel memetic (multi-objective) optimization strategy based on dimension reduction in decision space (DRMOS). DRMOS firstly analyzes the mapping relation between decision variables and objective functions. Then, it reduces the dimension of the search space by dividing the decision space into several subspaces according to the obtained relation. Finally, it improves the population by the memetic local search strategies in these decision subspaces separately. Further, DRMOS has good portability to other multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs); that is, it is easily compatible with existing MOEAs. In order to evaluate its performance, we embed DRMOS in several state of the art MOEAs to facilitate our experiments. The results show that DRMOS has the advantage in terms of convergence speed, diversity maintenance, and portability when solving MOPs with an unbalanced mapping relation between decision variables and objective functions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (19-21) ◽  
pp. 1740073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Song Huang ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Zhicheng Ji

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) need to be solved in real world recently. In this paper, a multi-objective particle swarm optimization based on Pareto set and aggregation approach was proposed to deal with MOPs. Firstly, velocities and positions were updated similar to PSO. Then, global-best set was defined in particle swarm optimizer to preserve Pareto-based set obtained by the population. Specifically, a hybrid updating strategy based on Pareto set and aggregation approach was introduced to update the global-best set and local search was carried on global-best set. Thirdly, personal-best positions were updated in decomposition way, and global-best position was selected from global-best set. Finally, ZDT instances and DTLZ instances were selected to evaluate the performance of MULPSO and the results show validity of the proposed algorithm for MOPs.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiang Yi ◽  
Xiaowei Yang ◽  
Han Huang ◽  
Jiahai Wang

Constrained multi-objective optimization problems exist widely in real-world applications, and they involve a simultaneous optimization of multiple and often conflicting objectives subject to several equality and/or inequality constraints. To deal with these problems, a crucial issue is how to handle constraints effectively. This paper proposes a simple yet effective constrained decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. In the proposal, the evolutionary process is divided into two stages in which constraints are handled differently. In the first stage, constraints are totally ignored and the population is pulled toward the unconstrained Pareto-optimal front (PF) by optimizing objectives only. This can help the proposed algorithm handle well problems with the following features, i.e., the constrained PF has an intersection with the unconstrained counterpart, and there are infeasible regions blocking the way of convergence. In the second stage, with the purpose of approximating the constrained PF well,constraint satisfaction is emphasized over objective minimization.Moreover, different evolutionary frameworks are adopted in the two stages to promote the performance of the algorithm as much as possible. The proposed algorithm is comprehensively compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms on 39 problems (with 266 test instances in total), including one real-world problem (with 36 instances) in search-based software engineering. As shown by the experimental results, the new algorithm performs best on the majority of these problems, particularly on those with the aforementioned features. In summary, the suggested algorithm provides an effective way of handling constrained multi-objective optimization problems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 9153
Author(s):  
Vinicius Renan de Carvalho ◽  
Ender Özcan ◽  
Jaime Simão Sichman

As exact algorithms are unfeasible to solve real optimization problems, due to their computational complexity, meta-heuristics are usually used to solve them. However, choosing a meta-heuristic to solve a particular optimization problem is a non-trivial task, and often requires a time-consuming trial and error process. Hyper-heuristics, which are heuristics to choose heuristics, have been proposed as a means to both simplify and improve algorithm selection or configuration for optimization problems. This paper novel presents a novel cross-domain evaluation for multi-objective optimization: we investigate how four state-of-the-art online hyper-heuristics with different characteristics perform in order to find solutions for eighteen real-world multi-objective optimization problems. These hyper-heuristics were designed in previous studies and tackle the algorithm selection problem from different perspectives: Election-Based, based on Reinforcement Learning and based on a mathematical function. All studied hyper-heuristics control a set of five Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) as Low-Level (meta-)Heuristics (LLHs) while finding solutions for the optimization problem. To our knowledge, this work is the first to deal conjointly with the following issues: (i) selection of meta-heuristics instead of simple operators (ii) focus on multi-objective optimization problems, (iii) experiments on real world problems and not just function benchmarks. In our experiments, we computed, for each algorithm execution, Hypervolume and IGD+ and compared the results considering the Kruskal–Wallis statistical test. Furthermore, we ranked all the tested algorithms considering three different Friedman Rankings to summarize the cross-domain analysis. Our results showed that hyper-heuristics have a better cross-domain performance than single meta-heuristics, which makes them excellent candidates for solving new multi-objective optimization problems.


Symmetry ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Junhua Ku ◽  
Fei Ming ◽  
Wenyin Gong

In the real-world, symmetry or asymmetry widely exists in various problems. Some of them can be formulated as constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs). During the past few years, handling CMOPs by evolutionary algorithms has become more popular. Lots of constrained multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs) have been proposed. Whereas different CMOEAs may be more suitable for different CMOPs, it is difficult to choose the best one for a CMOP at hand. In this paper, we propose an ensemble framework of CMOEAs that aims to achieve better versatility on handling diverse CMOPs. In the proposed framework, the hypervolume indicator is used to evaluate the performance of CMOEAs, and a decreasing mechanism is devised to delete the poorly performed CMOEAs and to gradually determine the most suitable CMOEA. A new CMOEA, namely ECMOEA, is developed based on the framework and three state-of-the-art CMOEAs. Experimental results on five benchmarks with totally 52 instances demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. In addition, the superiority of ECMOEA is verified through comparisons to seven state-of-the-art CMOEAs. Moreover, the effectiveness of ECMOEA on the real-world problems is also evaluated for eight instances.


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