Use of cooperative coevolution for solving large scale multiobjective optimization problems

Abstract

Many real-world multi-objective optimization problems have hundreds or even thousands of decision variables, which contrast with the current practice of multi-objective metaheuristics whose performance is typically assessed using benchmark problems with a relatively low number of decision variables (normally, no more than 30). In this paper, we propose a cooperative coevolution framework that is capable of optimizing large scale (in decision variable space) multi-objective optimization problems. We adopt a benchmark that is scalable in the number of decision variables (the ZDT test suite) and compare our proposed algorithm with respect to two state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (GDE3 and NSGA-II) when using a large number of decision variables (from 200 up to 5000). The results clearly indicate that our proposed approach is effective as well as efficient for solving large scale multi-objective optimization problems.