An adaptive immune-inspired multi-objective algorithm with multiple differential evolution strategies

Abstract

Most multi-objective immune algorithms (MOIAs) adopt clonal selection to speed up convergence, as this operator only clones the best individuals during the search process. However, this approach somehow deteriorates the population diversity, which may cause a MOIA to be trapped in a local optimum and could also lead to premature convergence when tackling some complicated multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). In order to overcome this problem, an adaptive immune-inspired multi-objective algorithm (AIMA) is presented in this paper, in which multiple differential evolution (DE) strategies having distinct advantages are embedded into a conventional MOIA. Our proposed approach strengthens the exploration capabilities of a MOIA while also improving its population diversity. At each generation, based on the current search stage, an adaptive selection method is designed to choose an appropriate DE strategy for evolution. The core idea is to effectively combine the advantages of three DE strategies when solving different MOPs. A number of comparative experiments are conducted on the well-known and frequently-used WFG and DTLZ test problems. Our experimental results validate the superiority of our proposed AIMA, as it performs better than some state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization algorithms and some state-of-the-art MOIAs.