Mixture Surrogate Models for Multi- Objective Optimization

Abstract

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOOP) involve minimization of more than one objective functions and all of them are to be simultaneously minimized. The solution of these problems involves a large number of iterations. The multi- objective optimization problems related structural optimization of complex engineering structures is usually solved with finite element analysis (FEA). The solution time required to solve these FEA based solutions are very high. So surrogate models or meta- models are used to approximate the finite element solution during the optimization process. These surrogate assisted multi- objective optimization techniques are very commonly used in the current literature. These optimization techniques use evolutionary algorithm and it is very difficult to guarantee the convergence of the final solution, especially in the cases where the budget of costly function evaluations is low. In such cases, it is required to increase the efficiency of surrogate models in terms of accuracy and total efforts required to find the final solutions.In this paper, an advanced surrogate assisted multi- objective optimization algorithm (ASMO) is developed. This algorithm can handle linear, equality and non- linear constraints and can be applied to both benchmark and engineering application problems. This algorithm does not require any prior knowledge for the selection of surrogate models. During the optimization process, best single and mixture surrogate models are automatically selected. The advanced surrogate models are created by MATSuMoTo, the MATLAB based tool box. These mixture models are built by Dempster- Shafer theory (DST). This theory has a capacity to handle multiple model characteristics for the selection of best models. By adopting this strategy, it is ensured that most accurate surrogate models are selected. There can be different kind of surrogate models for objective and constraint functions. Multi-objective optimization of machine tool spindle is studied as the test problem for this algorithm and it is observed that the proposed strategy is able to find the non- dominated solutions with minimum number of costly function evaluations. The developed method can be applied to other benchmark and engineering applications.