MOEA/D with Random Partial Update Strategy

Recent studies on resource allocation suggest that some subproblems are more important than others in the context of the MOEA/D, and that focusing on the most relevant ones can consistently improve the performance of that algorithm. These studies share the common characteristic of updating only a fraction of the population at any given iteration of the algorithm. In this work, we investigate a new, more straightforward partial update strategy, in which a random subset of solutions is selected at every iteration. The performance of the MOEA/D-DE using this new resource allocation approach is compared experimentally against that of the standard MOEA/D-DE and the MOEA/D-DE with relative improvement-based resource allocation. The results indicate that using MOEA/D with this new partial update strategy results in improved HV and IGD values, and a much higher proportion of non-dominated solutions, particularly as the number of updated solutions at every iteration is reduced.

I. Introduction

Multi-objective Optimization Problems (MOPs) appear in many application contexts in which several conflicting objective functions need to be simultaneously optimized. Finding good sets of solutions for general continuous MOPs is generally considered a hard problem, mainly when convexity or differentiability cannot be assumed, for which Evolutionary Algorithms have been proposed as potential solvers [1]–[3].