An Enhanced Decomposition-Based Evolutionary Algorithm With Adaptive Reference Vectors

Multiobjective optimization problems with more than three objectives are commonly referred to as many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). Development of algorithms to solve MaOPs has garnered significant research attention in recent years. “Decomposition” is a commonly adopted approach toward this aim, wherein the problem is divided into a set of simpler subproblems guided by a set of reference vectors. The reference vectors are often predefined and distributed uniformly in the objective space. Use of such uniform distribution of reference vectors has shown commendable performance on problems with “regular” Pareto optimal front (POF), i.e., those that are nondegenerate, smooth, continuous, and easily mapped by a unit simplex of reference vectors. However, the performance deteriorates for problems with “irregular” POF (i.e., which deviate from above properties), since a number of reference vectors may not have a solution on the POF along them. While adaptive approaches have been suggested in the literature that attempt to delete/insert reference directions conforming to the geometry of the evolving front, their performance may in turn be compromised for problems with regular POFs. This paper presents a generalized version of previously proposed decomposition-based evolutionary algorithm with adaptive reference vectors, intended toward achieving competitive performance for both types of problems. The proposed approach starts off with a set of uniform reference vectors and collects information about feasibility and nondominance of solutions that associate with the reference vectors over a learning period. Subsequently, new reference directions are inserted/deleted, while the original directions may assume an active or inactive role during the course of evolution. Numerical experiments are conducted over a wide range of problems with regular and irregular POFs with up to 15 objectives to demonstrate the competence of the proposed approach with the state-of-the-art methods.