A Constrained Many-Objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithm With Enhanced Mating and Environmental Selections.

Abstract

Unlike the considerable research on solving many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) with evolutionary algorithms (EAs), there has been much less research on constrained MaOPs (CMaOPs). Generally, to effectively solve CMaOPs, an algorithm needs to balance feasibility, convergence, and diversity simultaneously. It is essential for handling CMaOPs yet most of the existing research encounters difficulties. This article proposes a novel constrained many-objective optimization EA with enhanced mating and environmental selections, namely, CMME. It can be featured as: 1) two novel ranking strategies are proposed and used in the mating and environmental selections to enrich feasibility, diversity, and convergence; 2) a novel individual density estimation is designed, and the crowding distance is integrated to promote diversity; and 3) the \θ-dominance is used to strengthen the selection pressure on promoting both the convergence and diversity. The synergy of these components can achieve the goal of balancing feasibility, convergence, and diversity for solving CMaOPs. The proposed CMME is extensively evaluated on 13 CMaOPs and 3 real-world applications. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and competitiveness of CMME over nine related algorithms.