A random-based dynamic grouping strategy for large scale multi-objective optimization

This paper presents a random-based dynamic grouping strategy (RDG) for cooperative coevolution to deal with large scale multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) by decomposing the whole dimension into several groups of variables with an equal size. First, a decomposer pool containing different group sizes is designed. Then, a group size is dynamically selected with probability in the evolution process. The probability of each group size in the pool is computed based on the historical performance measured by C-metric, a common metric in multi-objective optimization. Under the selected group size, random grouping is executed to decompose the whole dimension into groups. Through this, both the group size and the group components are dynamic. Finally, combining RDG with a traditional and famous multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) named MOEA/D, we develop MOEA/D-RDG to cope with large scale MOPs. The efficacy of the proposed MOEA/D-RDG is verified on two sets of MOPs (UF1-UF10 and WFG1-WFG9) through comparing with two MOEA/D variants.