Evaluating selection methods on hyper-heuristic multi-objective particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) is a promising meta-heuristic to solve multi-objective problems (MOPs). Previous works have shown that selecting a proper combination of leader and archiving methods, which is a challenging task, improves the search ability of the algorithm. A previous study has employed a simple hyper-heuristic to select these components, obtaining good results. In this research, an analysis is made to verify if using more advanced heuristic selection methods improves the search ability of the algorithm. Empirical studies are conducted to investigate this hypothesis. In these studies, first, four heuristic selection methods are compared: a choice function, a multi-armed bandit, a random one, and the previously proposed roulette wheel. A second study is made to identify if it is best to adapt only the leader method, the archiving method, or both simultaneously. Moreover, the influence of the interval used to replace the low-level heuristic is analyzed. At last, a final study compares the best variant to a hyper-heuristic framework that combines a Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm into the multi-objective optimization based on decomposition with dynamical resource allocation (MOEA/D-DRA) and a state-of-the-art MOPSO. Our results indicate that the resulting algorithm outperforms the hyper-heuristic framework in most of the problems investigated. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to a state-of-the-art MOPSO.