A Cooperative Evolutionary Framework Based on an Improved Version of Directed Weight Vectors for Constrained Multiobjective Optimization With Deceptive Constraints

When solving constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs), the most commonly used way of measuring constraint violation is to calculate the sum of all constraint violations of a solution as its distance to feasibility. However, this kind of constraint violation measure may not reflect the distance of an infeasible solution from feasibility for some problems, for example, when an infeasible solution closer to a feasible region does not have a smaller constraint violation than the one farther away from a feasible region. Unfortunately, no set of artificial benchmark problems focusing on this area exists. To remedy this issue, a set of CMOPs with deceptive constraints is introduced in this article. It is the first attempt to consider CMOPs with deceptive constraints (DCMOPs). Based on our previous work, which designed a set of directed weight vectors to solve CMOPs, this article proposes a cooperative framework with an improved version of directed weight vectors to solve DCMOPs. Specifically, the cooperative framework consists of two switchable phases. The first phase uses two subpopulations—one to explore feasible regions and the other to explore the entire space. The two subpopulations provide useful information about the optimal direction of objective improvement to each other. The second phase aims mainly at finding Pareto-optimal solutions. Then an infeasibility utilization strategy is used to improve the objective function values. The two phases are switchable based on the information found to date at any time in the evolutionary process. The experimental results show that this method significantly outperforms the algorithms with which it is compared on most of the DCMOPs, in terms of reliability and stability in finding a set of well-distributed optimal solutions.