A Multiobjective Framework for Many-Objective Optimization

Abstract

It is known that many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) often face the difficulty of maintaining good diversity and convergence in the search process due to the high-dimensional objective space. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel multiobjective framework for many-objective optimization (Mo4Ma), which transforms the many-objective space into multiobjective space. First, the many objectives are transformed into two indicative objectives of convergence and diversity. Second, a clustering-based sequential selection strategy is put forward in the transformed multiobjective space to guide the evolutionary search process. Specifically, the selection is circularly performed on the clustered subpopulations to maintain population diversity. In each round of selection, solutions with good performance in the transformed multiobjective space will be chosen to improve the overall convergence. The Mo4Ma is a generic framework that any type of evolutionary computation algorithm can incorporate compatibly. In this article, the differential evolution (DE) is adopted as the optimizer in the Mo4Ma framework, thus resulting in an Mo4Ma-DE algorithm. Experimental results show that the Mo4Ma-DE algorithm can obtain well-converged and widely distributed Pareto solutions along with the many-objective Pareto sets of the original MaOPs. Compared with seven state-of-the-art MaOP algorithms, the proposed Mo4Ma-DE algorithm shows strong competitiveness and general better performance. © 2013 IEEE.