Hybrid of memory and prediction strategies for dynamic multiobjective optimization

Abstract

Dynamic multiobjective optimization problems (DMOPs) are characterized by a time-variant Pareto optimal front (PF) and/or Pareto optimal set (PS). To handle DMOPs, an algorithm should be able to track the movement of the PF/PS over time efficiently. In this paper, a novel dynamic multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (DMOEA) is proposed for solving DMOPs, which includes a hybrid of memory and prediction strategies (HMPS) and the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). In particular, the resultant algorithm (MOEA/D-HMPS) detects environmental changes and identifies the similarity of a change to the historical changes, based on which two different response strategies are applied. If a detected change is dissimilar to any historical changes, a differential prediction based on the previous two consecutive population centers is utilized to relocate the population individuals in the new environment; otherwise, a memory-based technique devised to predict the new locations of the population members is applied. Both response mechanisms mix a portion of existing solutions with randomly generated solutions to alleviate the effect of prediction errors caused by sharp or irregular changes. MOEA/D-HMPS was tested on 14 benchmark problems and compared with state-of-the-art DMOEAs. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of MOEA/D-HMPS in solving various DMOPs.