Balancing Pareto Front exploration of Non-dominated Tournament Genetic Algorithm (B-NTGA) in solving multi-objective NP-hard problems with constraints

Abstract

The paper presents a new balanced selection operator applied to the proposed Balanced Non-dominated Tournament Genetic Algorithm (B-NTGA) that actively uses archive to solve multi- and many-objective NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems with constraints. The primary motivation is to make B-NTGA more efficient in exploring Pareto Front Approximation (PFa), focusing on “gaps” and reducing some PFa regions' sampling too frequently. Such a balancing mechanism allows B-NTGA to be more adaptive and focus on less explored PFa regions. The proposed B-NTGA is investigated on two benchmark multi- and many-objective optimization real-world problems, like Thief Traveling Problem and Multi-Skill Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem. The results of experiments show that B-NTGA has a higher efficiency and better performance than state-of-the-art methods.