Evolutionary continuous constrained optimization using random direction repair

Abstract

To solve constrained optimization problems (COPs), it is crucial to guide the infeasible solution to a feasible region. Gradient-based repair (GR) is a successful repair strategy, where the forward difference is often used to estimate the gradient. However, GR has major deficiencies. First, it is difficult to deal with individuals falling into the local optima. Second, large amounts of fitness evaluations are required to estimate the gradient. In this paper, we proposed a new repair strategy, random direction repair (RDR). RDR generates a set of random directions, and calculates the repair direction and the repair step size of infeasible individual to reduce its constraint violation. Since the introduction of randomness, RDR could deal with individuals falling into the local optima. Furthermore, RDR only requires a few number of fitness evaluation. To demonstrate the performance of RDR, RDR was embedded into two state-of-the-art evolutionary continuous constrained optimization algorithms, tested on the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2017 constrained real-parameter optimization benchmark. Experimental results demonstrated that RDR combined with evolutionary algorithms are highly competitive.