Decomposition based dominance relationship for evolutionary many-objective algorithm

Abstract

Decomposition based evolutionary algorithms have achieved great success in solving many-objective optimization problems. However, the design of proper decomposition vectors is not an easy task, especially in high dimensional objective space. In this paper, we study how to better use these decomposition vectors. We first show that for any given decomposition vector, new dominance relationship and crowding measurement strategy can be well defined. Based on them, we then propose a new evolutionary algorithm for many objective optimization. By this way, the utilization efficiency of decomposition vectors is enhanced and thus the task of weights design is alleviated accordingly. Experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with four state-of-the-art decomposition based evolutionary algorithms on a set of well-known many-objective test problems with 5 to 10 objectives. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve comparable results with fewer decomposition vectors.