Adaptively Allocating Constraint-Handling Techniques for Constrained Multi-objective Optimization Problems

Abstract

For solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs), an effective constraint-handling technique (CHT) is of great importance. Recently, many CHTs have been proposed for solving CMOPs. However, no single CHT can outperform all kinds of CMOPs. This paper proposes an algorithm, namely, ACHT-M2M, which adaptively allocates the existing CHTs in an M2M framework for solving CMOPs. To be more specific, a CMOP is first decomposed into several constrained multi-objective optimization subproblems by ACHT-M2M. Each subproblem has a subpopulation in a subregion. CHT for each subregion is adaptively allocated according to a proposed composite performance measure. Population for the next generation is selected from subregions by selection operators with different CHTs and the obtained nondominated feasible solutions in each generation are used to update a predefined archive. ACHT-M2M assembles the advantages of different CHTs and makes them cooperate with each other. The proposed ACHT-M2M is finally compared with the other 12 representative algorithms on benchmark CMOPs and the experimental results further confirm the effectiveness of ACHT-M2M for solving CMOPs.