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• A many objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition and moth search is proposed. • Random and adaptive weights is used to break the limitation of uniform distribution weights. • Mutual evaluation value is used to evaluate the optimal individual in the neighborhood. • Improving scale factor α in MSA is to improve the performance of the proposed algorithm. Decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) has good performance in solving multi-objective problems (MOPs) but poor performance in solving many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). The weight vectors in MOEA/D are relatively fixed, which results in poor performance when dealing with complex MaOPs. In this paper, random and adaptive weights are introduced into MOEA/D to break the limitation of fixed weight vectors. And the moth search algorithm (MSA) is used as an operator to improve global search ability. The updating strategies in MSA are more consistent with the neighborhood learning strategy adopted in MOEA/D. In addition, to enable MSA to find the optimal solution in the neighborhood on the MaOPs to update other individuals. This paper introduces mutual evaluation value for evaluating the optimal individual in the neighborhood, and the proposed algorithm is abbreviated as MOEA/DMS. In comparative experiments on the MaF test suite, hypervolume (HV) and inverted generational distance (IGD) are used to measure MOEA/DMS and other many-objective evolutionary algorithms (MaOEAs). The results show that MOEA/DMS has an excellent performance in dealing with MaOPs. Besides, MOEA/DMS is compared with other state-of-the-art MaOEAs on two combinatorial MaOPs. The results show that MOEA/DMS also has significant advantages in dealing with combinatorial MaOPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1 This paper proposes an adaptive clustering-based many-objective evolutionary algorithm. 2 A unit hypersurface is estimated to roughly reflect the characteristicsof Pareto fronts. 3 The adaptive clustering can properly fit various Pareto frontsforthe targetproblem. 4 The proposed algorithmimprovestheperformanceondifferentproblemswith various Pareto fronts. This paper proposes an adaptive clustering-based evolutionary algorithm for many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs), called MaOEA/AC. In this algorithm, an adaptive clustering strategy (ACS) is first introduced to divide the population into multiple clusters, which can properly fit various Pareto fronts (PFs) of the target MaOPs. Then, the environmental selection of MaOEA/AC is designed based on these clusters to collect the solutions with balanceable convergence and diversity. To be more detail, the similarity between solutions in ACS is appropriately measured by computing the Euclidean distance between their projections on an adaptive unit hyper-surface, whose curving rate is controlled by a parameter p. A simple yet effective estimation method is proposed to get a suitable value of p based on the distribution of the current non-dominated solution set, so that the estimated unit hyper-surface can roughly reflect the characteristics of PFs in the target MaOPs. The effectiveness of MaOEA/AC is validated by numerous experimental studies on solving test MaOPs with various PFs, which have the characteristics with convex, concave, inverted, disconnected, degenerated, and other mixed or irregular PFs. The experiments also show that MaOEA/AC has the superior performance over several recent many-objective evolutionary algorithms, when solving most of these test MaOPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In evolutionary multiobjective optimization, effectiveness refers to how an evolutionary algorithm performs in terms of converging its solutions into the Pareto front and also diversifying them over the front. This is not an easy job, particularly for optimization problems with more than three objectives, dubbed many-objective optimization problems. In such problems, classic Pareto-based algorithms fail to provide sufficient selection pressure towards the Pareto front, whilst recently developed algorithms, such as decomposition-based ones, may struggle to maintain a set of well-distributed solutions on certain problems (e.g., those with irregular Pareto fronts). Another issue in some many-objective optimizers is rapidly increasing computational requirement with the number of objectives, such as hypervolume-based algorithms and shift-based density estimation (SDE) methods. In this paper, we aim to address this problem and develop an effective and efficient evolutionary algorithm (E3A) that can handle various many-objective problems. In E3A, inspired by SDE, a novel population maintenance method is proposed to select high-quality solutions in the environmental selection procedure. We conduct extensive experiments and show that E3A performs better than 11 state-of-the-art many-objective evolutionary algorithms in quickly finding a set of well-converged and well-diversified solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many-objective problems, how to maintain the diversity and convergence of the distribution of the solution set over Pareto front (PF) has always been the research emphasis. In the iteration process, the state of population is critical to improve the level of evolution. Therefore, this paper will use two convergence and diversity indicators to further strengthen the usage of evolutionary state information and propose a dynamic learning strategy. In addition, a dynamic learning strategy based many-objective evolutionary algorithm (MaOEA) is proposed, called dynamic learning evolution algorithm (DLEA), which continuously changes the direction of learning: convergence and diversity in the iteration process. The purpose is to make the algorithm prefer to convergence in the early iteration and prefer to diversity when it is close to PF in the late iteration, so that the convergence and diversity of the final solution set can be well maintained. And then, the performance of DLEA is measured by two indicators. Meanwhile, DLEA will be compared with four state-of-the-art algorithms on the DTLZ and MaF, and its performance will be verified on a many-objective combinatorial problem. And the experimental results and Friedman test show that DLEA has great advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The niche-based density estimation and angle-based selection strategy are devised. • Individuals with poor diversity are identified by niche-based density estimation. • Individuals with worse convergence are removed via angle-based selection. • NAEA can be easily extended to constrained many-objective optimization problems. It is well known that balancing population diversity and convergence plays a crucial role in evolutionary many-objective optimization. However, most existing multiobjective evolutionary algorithms encounter difficulties in solving many-objective optimization problems. Thus, this paper suggests niche-based and angle-based selection strategies for many-objective evolutionary optimization. In the proposed algorithm, two strategies are included: niche-based density estimation strategy and angle-based selection strategy. Both strategies are employed in the environmental selection to eliminate the worst individual from the population in an iterative way. To be specific, the former estimates the diversity of each individual and finds the most crowded area in the population. The latter removes individuals with weak convergence in the same niche. Experimental studies on several well-known benchmark problems show that the proposed algorithm is competitive compared with six state-of-the-art many-objective algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has also been verified to be scalable to deal with constrained many-objective optimization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various evolutionary algorithms have been proposed for tackling many-objective optimization problems over the past three decades. However, these algorithms still suffer from the loss of selection pressures due to the existence of dominance resistance. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a relative non-dominance matrix, based on which a fitness formula is defined. Empirical analyses show that solutions with smaller fitness values are likely to dominate more other solutions in the future evolutionary process, and play a vital role in enhancing the convergence toward to the true Pareto fronts. Additionally, to further ensure the diversity, k -means clustering strategy is combined with the relative non-dominance matrix for a new design of the environmental selection, where parameter k in the clustering strategy is adjusted adaptively. The proposed algorithm is extensively tested with four state-of-art algorithms on WFG, MaF and DTLZ test suites. Empirical comparisons demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed algorithm regarding to the convergence, diversity and spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract It is well known that maintaining a good balance between convergence and diversity is crucial to the performance of multiobjective optimization algorithms (MOEAs). However, the Pareto front (PF) of multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) affects the performance of MOEAs, especially reference point-based ones. This paper proposes a reference-point-based adaptive method to study the PF of MOPs according to the candidate solutions of the population. In addition, the proportion and angle function presented selects elites during environmental selection. Compared with five state-of-the-art MOEAs, the proposed algorithm shows highly competitive effectiveness on MOPs with six complex characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Achieving a balance between convergence and diversity in many-objective optimization is a great challenge. This paper suggests an evolutionary algorithm based on a region search strategy to deal with different kinds of benchmark problems. In the proposed algorithm, each solution is associated with a region, and the region search strategy is applied to constrain the updating process; this strategy will enhance the diversity of population without losing convergence. A new normalization procedure is used for dealing with scaled problems. Moreover, the comparison of two solutions is based on both dominance relation and perpendicular distance; the result shows the algorithm's reliability for solving both convex and concave problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated by several well-known benchmark problems with different properties. Seven state-of-the-art algorithms are compared and the experimental results demonstrate that the introduced algorithm performs the best on almost all benchmark problems. Furthermore, the proposed strategy depicts a high computational efficiency for solving the problems with a high dimension of objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]