EliteNSGA-III: An improved evolutionary many-objective optimization algorithm

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms are the most studied and successful population-based algorithms for solving single- and multi-objective optimization problems. However, many studies have shown that these algorithms fail to perform well when handling many-objective (more than three objectives) problems due to the loss of selection pressure to pull the population towards the Pareto front. As a result, there has been a number of efforts towards developing evolutionary algorithms that can successfully handle many-objective optimization problems without deteriorating the effect of evolutionary operators. A reference-point based NSGA-II (NSGA-III) is one such algorithm designed to deal with many-objective problems, where the diversity of the solution is guided by a number of well-spread reference points. However, NSGA-III still has difficulty preserving elite population as new solutions are generated. In this paper, we propose an improved NSGA-III algorithm, called EliteNSGA-III to improve the diversity and accuracy of the NSGA-III algorithm. EliteNSGA-III algorithm maintains an elite population archive to preserve previously generated elite solutions that would probably be eliminated by NSGA-III's selection procedure. The proposed EliteNSGA-III algorithm is applied to II many-objective test problems with three to I5 objectives. Experimental results show that the proposed EliteNSGA-III algorithm outperforms the NSGA-III algorithm in terms of diversity and accuracy of the obtained solutions, especially for test problems with higher objectives.