A Novel Objective Grouping Evolutionary Algorithm for Many-Objective Optimization Problems

Author(s):  
Xiaofang Guo ◽  
Xiaoli Wang

The thorniest difficulties for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) handling many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) are the inefficiency of selection operators and high computational cost. To alleviate such difficulties and simplify the MaOPs, objective reduction algorithms have been proposed to remove the redundant objectives during the search process. However, those algorithms can only be applicable to specific problems with redundant objectives. Worse still, the Pareto solutions obtained by reduced objective set may not be the Pareto solutions of the original MaOPs. In this paper, we present a novel objective grouping evolutionary algorithm (OGEA) for general MaOPs. First, by dividing original objective set into several overlapping lower-dimensional subsets in terms of interdependence correlation information, we aim to separate the MaOPs into a number of sub-problems so that each of them can be able to preserve as much dominance structure in the original objective set as possible. Subsequently, we employ the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) to generate Pareto solutions. Besides, instead of nondominated sorting on the whole population, a novel dual selection mechanism is proposed to choose individuals either having high ranks in subspaces or locating sparse region in the objective space for better proximity and diversity. Finally, we compare the proposed strategy with the other two classical space partition methods on benchmark DTLZ5 (I, M), DTLZ2 and a practical engineering problem. Numerical results show the proposed objective grouping algorithm can preserve more dominance structure in original objective set and achieve better quality of Pareto solutions.

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 20-42
Author(s):  
André R. da Cruz

This paper presents a new procedure for the nondominated sorting with constraint handling to be used in a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. The strategy uses a sorting algorithm and binary search to classify the solutions in the correct level of the Pareto front. In a problem with objective functions, using solutions in the population, the original nondominated sorting algorithm, used by NSGA-II, has always a computational cost of in a naïve implementation. The complexity of the new algorithm can vary from in the best case and in the worst case. A experiment was executed in order to compare the new algorithm with the original and another improved version of the Deb’s algorithm. Results reveal that the new strategy is much better than other versions when there are many levels in Pareto front. It is also concluded that is interesting to alternate the new algorithm and the improved Deb’s version during the evolution of the evolutionary algorithm.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 256-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Seok Park ◽  
Trung Thanh Nguyen

Abstract Energy efficiency is an essential consideration in sustainable manufacturing. This study presents the car fender-based injection molding process optimization that aims to resolve the trade-off between energy consumption and product quality at the same time in which process parameters are optimized variables. The process is specially optimized by applying response surface methodology and using nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA II) in order to resolve multi-object optimization problems. To reduce computational cost and time in the problem-solving procedure, the combination of CAE-integration tools is employed. Based on the Pareto diagram, an appropriate solution is derived out to obtain optimal parameters. The optimization results show that the proposed approach can help effectively engineers in identifying optimal process parameters and achieving competitive advantages of energy consumption and product quality. In addition, the engineering analysis that can be employed to conduct holistic optimization of the injection molding process in order to increase energy efficiency and product quality was also mentioned in this paper.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maoqing Zhang ◽  
Lei Wang ◽  
Zhihua Cui ◽  
Jiangshan Liu ◽  
Dong Du ◽  
...  

Fast nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is a classical method for multiobjective optimization problems and has exhibited outstanding performance in many practical engineering problems. However, the tournament selection strategy used for the reproduction in NSGA-II may generate a large amount of repetitive individuals, resulting in the decrease of population diversity. To alleviate this issue, Lévy distribution, which is famous for excellent search ability in the cuckoo search algorithm, is incorporated into NSGA-II. To verify the proposed algorithm, this paper employs three different test sets, including ZDT, DTLZ, and MaF test suits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more promising compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Parameter sensitivity analysis further confirms the robustness of the proposed algorithm. In addition, a two-objective network topology optimization model is then used to further verify the proposed algorithm. The practical comparison results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more effective in dealing with practical engineering optimization problems.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (06) ◽  
pp. 1950016 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Vo-Duy ◽  
D. Duong-Gia ◽  
V. Ho-Huu ◽  
T. Nguyen-Thoi

This paper proposes an effective couple method for solving reliability-based multi-objective optimization problems of truss structures with static and dynamic constraints. The proposed coupling method integrates a single-loop deterministic method (SLDM) into the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) algorithm to give the so-called SLDM-NSGA-II. Thanks to the advantage of SLDM, the probabilistic constraints are treated as approximating deterministic constraints. And therefore the reliability-based multi-objective optimization problems can be transformed into the deterministic multi-objective optimization problems of which the computational cost is reduced significantly. In these reliability-based multi-objective optimization problems, the conflicting objective functions are to minimize the weight and the displacements of the truss. The design variables are cross-section areas of the bars and contraints include static and dynamic constraints. For reliability analysis, the effect of uncertainty of parameters such as force, added mass in the nodes, material properties and cross-section areas of the bars are taken into account. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method are demonstrated through three benchmark-type truss structures including a 10-bar planar truss, a 72-bar spatial truss and a 200-bar planar truss. Moreover, the influence of parameters on the reliability-based Pareto optimal fronts is also carried out.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalyanmoy Deb ◽  
Manikanth Mohan ◽  
Shikhar Mishra

Since the suggestion of a computing procedure of multiple Pareto-optimal solutions in multi-objective optimization problems in the early Nineties, researchers have been on the look out for a procedure which is computationally fast and simultaneously capable of finding a well-converged and well-distributed set of solutions. Most multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) developed in the past decade are either good for achieving a well-distributed solutions at the expense of a large computational effort or computationally fast at the expense of achieving a not-so-good distribution of solutions. For example, although the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm or SPEA (Zitzler and Thiele, 1999) produces a much better distribution compared to the elitist non-dominated sorting GA or NSGA-II (Deb et al., 2002a), the computational time needed to run SPEA is much greater. In this paper, we evaluate a recently-proposed steady-state MOEA (Deb et al., 2003) which was developed based on the ε-dominance concept introduced earlier (Laumanns et al., 2002) and using efficient parent and archive update strategies for achieving a well-distributed and well-converged set of solutions quickly. Based on an extensive comparative study with four other state-of-the-art MOEAs on a number of two, three, and four objective test problems, it is observed that the steady-state MOEA is a good compromise in terms of convergence near to the Pareto-optimal front, diversity of solutions, and computational time. Moreover, the ε-MOEA is a step closer towards making MOEAs pragmatic, particularly allowing a decision-maker to control the achievable accuracy in the obtained Pareto-optimal solutions.


2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimo Brockhoff ◽  
Eckart Zitzler

Many-objective problems represent a major challenge in the field of evolutionary multiobjective optimization—in terms of search efficiency, computational cost, decision making, visualization, and so on. This leads to various research questions, in particular whether certain objectives can be omitted in order to overcome or at least diminish the difficulties that arise when many, that is, more than three, objective functions are involved. This study addresses this question from different perspectives. First, we investigate how adding or omitting objectives affects the problem characteristics and propose a general notion of conflict between objective sets as a theoretical foundation for objective reduction. Second, we present both exact and heuristic algorithms to systematically reduce the number of objectives, while preserving as much as possible of the dominance structure of the underlying optimization problem. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed objective reduction method in the context of both decision making and search for a radar waveform application as well as for well-known test functions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-344
Author(s):  
Yifan Li ◽  
Hai-Lin Liu ◽  
E. D. Goodman

For a many-objective optimization problem with redundant objectives, we propose two novel objective reduction algorithms for linearly and, nonlinearly degenerate Pareto fronts. They are called LHA and NLHA respectively. The main idea of the proposed algorithms is to use a hyperplane with non-negative sparse coefficients to roughly approximate the structure of the PF. This approach is quite different from the previous objective reduction algorithms that are based on correlation or dominance structure. Especially in NLHA, in order to reduce the approximation error, we transform a nonlinearly degenerate Pareto front into a nearly linearly degenerate Pareto front via a power transformation. In addition, an objective reduction framework integrating a magnitude adjustment mechanism and a performance metric [Formula: see text] are also proposed here. Finally, to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms, comparative experiments are done with two correlation-based algorithms, LPCA and NLMVUPCA, and with two dominance-structure-based algorithms, PCSEA and greedy [Formula: see text]MOSS, on three benchmark problems: DTLZ5(I,M), MAOP(I,M), and WFG3(I,M). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are more effective.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiang He ◽  
Zheng Xiang ◽  
Peng Ren

Abstract In recent years, the dynamic multiobjective optimization problems (DMOPs), whose major strategy is to track the varying PS (Pareto Optimal Solution, PS) and/or PF (Pareto Optimal Frontier), caused a great deal of attention worldwide. As a promising solution, reusing of “experiences” to establish a prediction model is proved to be very useful and widely used in practice. However, most existing methods overlook the importance of environmental selection in the evolutionary processes. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multiobjective optimal evolutionary algorithm which is based on environmental selection and transfer learning (DMOEA-ESTL). This approach makes full use of the environmental selection and transfer learning technique to generate individuals for a new environment by reusing experience to maintain the diversity of the population and speed up the evolutionary process. As experimental validation, we embed this new scheme in the NSGA-II (non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm). We test the proposed algorithm with the help of six benchmark functions as well as compare it with the other two prediction based strategies FPS (Forward-looking Prediction Strategy, FPS) and PPS (Population Prediction Strategy, PPS). The experimental results testify that the proposed strategy can deal with the DMOPs effectively.


Author(s):  
Leshi Shu ◽  
Ping Jiang ◽  
Qi Zhou ◽  
Xiangzheng Meng ◽  
Yahui Zhang

Multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOGAs) are effective ways for obtaining Pareto solutions of multi-objective optimization problems. However, the high computational cost of MOGAs limits their applications to practical engineering optimization problems involving computational expensive simulations. To address this issue, a variable-fidelity metamodel (VFM) assisted MOGA approach is proposed, in which VFM is embedded in the computation process of MOGA to replace expensive simulation models. The VFM is updated in the optimization process considering the cost of simulation models with different fidelity and the effects of the VFM uncertainty. A numerical example and an engineering case are used to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach can obtain Pareto solutions with high quality and it outperforms the other three existing approaches in terms of computational efficiency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Wan Liang Wang ◽  
Weikun Li ◽  
Yu Le Wang

Balancing convergence and diversity has become a key point especially in many-objective optimization where the large numbers of objectives pose many challenges to the evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, an opposition-based evolutionary algorithm with the adaptive clustering mechanism is proposed for solving the complex optimization problem. In particular, opposition-based learning is integrated in the proposed algorithm to initialize the solution, and the nondominated sorting scheme with a new adaptive clustering mechanism is adopted in the environmental selection phase to ensure both convergence and diversity. The proposed method is compared with other nine evolutionary algorithms on a number of test problems with up to fifteen objectives, which verify the best performance of the proposed algorithm. Also, the algorithm is applied to a variety of multiobjective engineering optimization problems. The experimental results have shown the competitiveness and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in solving challenging real-world problems.


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