Using following heroes operation in multi-objective differential evolution for fast convergence

Abstract

In this study, a new hybrid variant of multi-objective differential evolution is developed to improve the extent and the speed of convergence by combining the ability of DE/rand/1 strategy (NSDE1) to retain only better solutions in the selection operation with the ability of Following Heroes operation from adaptive social evolution algorithm to rapidly propagate the effect of the best solutions to the entire population. Such an algorithm is quite useful for fast convergence, particularly in solving computationally intensive multi-objective optimization problems for which it is highly desirable to obtain the better quality optimal solutions in a limited number of function calculations. The performance of the algorithm is first analyzed on thirty multi-objective test problems from ZDT, DTLZ, and WFG test suites for a limited number of function calculations, and the results are compared with four well-established multi-objective optimization algorithms: real-coded elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (RNSGA-II), non-dominated sorting particle swarm optimization (NSPSO), adaptive social evolution (ASE) and non-dominated sorting differential evolution with DE/rand/1 strategy (NSDE1) and found to be superior. The analysis is further extended to model-based algorithms, Pareto efficient global optimization (ParEGO), kriging for expensive evaluation Pareto (KEEP), and surrogate optimization of computationally expensive multi-objective problems (SOCEMO) which are commonly used for computationally intensive problems. These involve an additional computational cost of evolving the surrogate models. The performance of the proposed algorithm is found to be better than these, though, it has a relatively simple algorithmic structure and does not involve any additional computational cost. The algorithm is then evaluated on computationally intensive multi-objective optimization of bulk polymerization of methyl methacrylate. The numerical results obtained for this problem show better convergence for a limited number of function calculations.