Parallel cooperative multiobjective coevolutionary algorithm for constrained multiobjective optimization problems

Abstract

The existing parallel multiobjective evolutionary computation does not perform well for constrained multiobjective optimization problems with discontinuous Pareto fronts or narrow feasible regions. This study parallelizes the state-of-the-art cooperative multiobjective coevolutionary algorithm and proposes an effective parallel evolutionary algorithm for constrained multiobjective optimization problems that are difficult to optimize. Two parallelization methods are compared: a global parallel model in which solution evaluations are performed in parallel, and a hybrid model that treats the cooperative populations in a distributed manner while performing each solution evaluation in parallel. The first model is a straightforward parallelization, while the second one capitalizes on the characteristics of the coevolutionary framework. To investigate the efficacy of the proposed models, experiments are conducted on constrained multiobjective optimization problems, including complex characteristics, while varying the number of parallel cores up to 64. The experiments compare the two proposed methods from the viewpoint of search performance and execution time. The experimental results reveal that the latter hybrid model shows better computational efficiency and scalability against an increasing number of cores without adversely affecting the search performance compared to the former straightforward parallelization.