scholarly journals Integrating Pseudo-Boolean Constraint Reasoning in Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms

Author(s):  
Miguel Terra-Neves ◽  
Inês Lynce ◽  
Vasco Manquinho

Constraint-based reasoning methods thrive in solving problem instances with a tight solution space. On the other hand, evolutionary algorithms are usually effective when it is not hard to satisfy the problem constraints. This dichotomy has been observed in many optimization problems. In the particular case of Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO), new recently proposed constraint-based algorithms have been shown to outperform more established evolutionary approaches when a given problem instance is hard to satisfy. In this paper, we propose the integration of constraint-based procedures in evolutionary algorithms for solving MOCO. First, a new core-based smart mutation operator is applied to individuals that do not satisfy all problem constraints. Additionally, a new smart improvement operator based on Minimal Correction Subsets is used to improve the quality of the population. Experimental results clearly show that the integration of these operators greatly improves multi-objective evolutionary algorithms MOEA/D and NSGAII. Moreover, even on problem instances with a tight solution space, the newly proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art constraint-based approaches for MOCO.

Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1906
Author(s):  
Amarjeet Prajapati ◽  
Zong Woo Geem

The success of any software system highly depends on the quality of architectural design. It has been observed that over time, the quality of software architectural design gets degraded. The software system with poor architecture design is difficult to understand and maintain. To improve the architecture of a software system, multiple design goals or objectives (often conflicting) need to be optimized simultaneously. To address such types of multi-objective optimization problems a variety of metaheuristic-oriented computational intelligence algorithms have been proposed. In existing approaches, harmony search (HS) algorithm has been demonstrated as an effective approach for numerous types of complex optimization problems. Despite the successful application of the HS algorithm on different non-software engineering optimization problems, it gained little attention in the direction of architecture reconstruction problem. In this study, we customize the original HS algorithm and propose a multi-objective harmony search algorithm for software architecture reconstruction (MoHS-SAR). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoHS-SAR, it has been tested on seven object-oriented software projects and compared with the existing related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in terms of different software architecture quality metrics and metaheuristic performance criteria. The experimental results show that the MoHS-SAR performs better compared to the other related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.


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.


Quantum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 454
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tan ◽  
Marc-Antoine Lemonde ◽  
Supanut Thanasilp ◽  
Jirawat Tangpanitanon ◽  
Dimitris G. Angelakis

We propose and analyze a set of variational quantum algorithms for solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems where a problem consisting of nc classical variables can be implemented on O(log⁡nc) number of qubits. The underlying encoding scheme allows for a systematic increase in correlations among the classical variables captured by a variational quantum state by progressively increasing the number of qubits involved. We first examine the simplest limit where all correlations are neglected, i.e. when the quantum state can only describe statistically independent classical variables. We apply this minimal encoding to find approximate solutions of a general problem instance comprised of 64 classical variables using 7 qubits. Next, we show how two-body correlations between the classical variables can be incorporated in the variational quantum state and how it can improve the quality of the approximate solutions. We give an example by solving a 42-variable Max-Cut problem using only 8 qubits where we exploit the specific topology of the problem. We analyze whether these cases can be optimized efficiently given the limited resources available in state-of-the-art quantum platforms. Lastly, we present the general framework for extending the expressibility of the probability distribution to any multi-body correlations.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Saúl Zapotecas-Martínez ◽  
Abel García-Nájera ◽  
Adriana Menchaca-Méndez

One of the major limitations of evolutionary algorithms based on the Lebesgue measure for multi-objective optimization is the computational cost required to approximate the Pareto front of a problem. Nonetheless, the Pareto compliance property of the Lebesgue measure makes it one of the most investigated indicators in the designing of indicator-based evolutionary algorithms (IBEAs). The main deficiency of IBEAs that use the Lebesgue measure is their computational cost which increases with the number of objectives of the problem. On this matter, the investigation presented in this paper introduces an evolutionary algorithm based on the Lebesgue measure to deal with box-constrained continuous multi-objective optimization problems. The proposed algorithm implicitly uses the regularity property of continuous multi-objective optimization problems that has suggested effectiveness when solving continuous problems with rough Pareto sets. On the other hand, the survival selection mechanism considers the local property of the Lebesgue measure, thus reducing the computational time in our algorithmic approach. The emerging indicator-based evolutionary algorithm is examined and compared versus three state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms based on the Lebesgue measure. In addition, we validate its performance on a set of artificial test problems with various characteristics, including multimodality, separability, and various Pareto front forms, incorporating concavity, convexity, and discontinuity. For a more exhaustive study, the proposed algorithm is evaluated in three real-world applications having four, five, and seven objective functions whose properties are unknown. We show the high competitiveness of our proposed approach, which, in many cases, improved the state-of-the-art indicator-based evolutionary algorithms on the multi-objective problems adopted in our investigation.


Author(s):  
Junhua Liu ◽  
Yuping Wang ◽  
Xingyin Wang ◽  
Si Guo ◽  
Xin Sui

The performance of the traditional Pareto-based evolutionary algorithms sharply reduces for many-objective optimization problems, one of the main reasons is that Pareto dominance could not provide sufficient selection pressure to make progress in a given population. To increase the selection pressure toward the global optimal solutions and better maintain the quality of selected solutions, in this paper, a new dominance method based on expanding dominated area is proposed. This dominance method skillfully combines the advantages of two existing popular dominance methods to further expand the dominated area and better maintain the quality of selected solutions. Besides, through dynamically adjusting its parameter with the iteration, our proposed dominance method can timely adjust the selection pressure in the process of evolution. To demonstrate the quality of selected solutions by our proposed dominance method, the experiments on a number of well-known benchmark problems with 5–25 objectives are conducted and compared with that of the four state-of-the-art dominance methods based on expanding dominated area. Experimental results show that the new dominance method not only enhances the selection pressure but also better maintains the quality of selected solutions.


Algorithms ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 146
Author(s):  
Aleksei Vakhnin ◽  
Evgenii Sopov

Modern real-valued optimization problems are complex and high-dimensional, and they are known as “large-scale global optimization (LSGO)” problems. Classic evolutionary algorithms (EAs) perform poorly on this class of problems because of the curse of dimensionality. Cooperative Coevolution (CC) is a high-performed framework for performing the decomposition of large-scale problems into smaller and easier subproblems by grouping objective variables. The efficiency of CC strongly depends on the size of groups and the grouping approach. In this study, an improved CC (iCC) approach for solving LSGO problems has been proposed and investigated. iCC changes the number of variables in subcomponents dynamically during the optimization process. The SHADE algorithm is used as a subcomponent optimizer. We have investigated the performance of iCC-SHADE and CC-SHADE on fifteen problems from the LSGO CEC’13 benchmark set provided by the IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation. The results of numerical experiments have shown that iCC-SHADE outperforms, on average, CC-SHADE with a fixed number of subcomponents. Also, we have compared iCC-SHADE with some state-of-the-art LSGO metaheuristics. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm is competitive with other efficient metaheuristics.


Author(s):  
Zhenkun Wang ◽  
Qingyan Li ◽  
Qite Yang ◽  
Hisao Ishibuchi

AbstractIt has been acknowledged that dominance-resistant solutions (DRSs) extensively exist in the feasible region of multi-objective optimization problems. Recent studies show that DRSs can cause serious performance degradation of many multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Thereafter, various strategies (e.g., the $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -dominance and the modified objective calculation) to eliminate DRSs have been proposed. However, these strategies may in turn cause algorithm inefficiency in other aspects. We argue that these coping strategies prevent the algorithm from obtaining some boundary solutions of an extremely convex Pareto front (ECPF). That is, there is a dilemma between eliminating DRSs and preserving boundary solutions of the ECPF. To illustrate such a dilemma, we propose a new multi-objective optimization test problem with the ECPF as well as DRSs. Using this test problem, we investigate the performance of six representative MOEAs in terms of boundary solutions preservation and DRS elimination. The results reveal that it is quite challenging to distinguish between DRSs and boundary solutions of the ECPF.


2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Toffolo ◽  
Ernesto Benini

A key feature of an efficient and reliable multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is the ability to maintain genetic diversity within a population of solutions. In this paper, we present a new diversity-preserving mechanism, the Genetic Diversity Evaluation Method (GeDEM), which considers a distance-based measure of genetic diversity as a real objective in fitness assignment. This provides a dual selection pressure towards the exploitation of current non-dominated solutions and the exploration of the search space. We also introduce a new multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, the Genetic Diversity Evolutionary Algorithm (GDEA), strictly designed around GeDEM and then we compare it with other state-of-the-art algorithms on a well-established suite of test problems. Experimental results clearly indicate that the performance of GDEA is top-level.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Xin Li ◽  
Xiaoli Li ◽  
Kang Wang

The key characteristic of multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is that it can find a good approximate multi-objective optimal solution set when solving multi-objective optimization problems(MOPs). However, most multi-objective evolutionary algorithms perform well on regular multi-objective optimization problems, but their performance on irregular fronts deteriorates. In order to remedy this issue, this paper studies the existing algorithms and proposes a multi-objective evolutionary based on niche selection to deal with irregular Pareto fronts. In this paper, the crowding degree is calculated by the niche method in the process of selecting parents when the non-dominated solutions converge to the first front, which improves the the quality of offspring solutions and which is beneficial to local search. In addition, niche selection is adopted into the process of environmental selection through considering the number and the location of the individuals in its niche radius, which improve the diversity of population. Finally, experimental results on 23 benchmark problems including MaF and IMOP show that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performance than the compared MOEAs.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document