A constrained multi-objective optimization algorithm using an efficient global diversity strategy

Abstract

When solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs), multiple conflicting objectives and multiple constraints need to be considered simultaneously, which are challenging to handle. Although some recent constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs) have been developed to solve CMOPs and have worked well on most CMOPs. However, for CMOPs with small feasible regions and complex constraints, the performance of most algorithms needs to be further improved, especially when the feasible region is composed of multiple disjoint parts or the search space is narrow. To address this issue, an efficient global diversity CMOEA (EGDCMO) is proposed in this paper to solve CMOPs, where a certain number of infeasible solutions with well-distributed feature are maintained in the evolutionary process. To this end, a set of weight vectors are used to specify several subregions in the objective space, and infeasible solutions are selected from each subregion. Furthermore, a new fitness function is used in this proposed algorithm to evaluate infeasible solutions, which can balance the importance of constraints and objectives. In addition, the infeasible solutions are ranked higher than the feasible solutions to focus on the search in the undeveloped areas for better diversity. After the comparison tests on three benchmark cases and an actual engineering application, EGDCMO has more impressive performance compared with other constrained evolutionary multi-objective algorithms.