An enhanced bacterial colony optimization with dynamic multi‐leader co‐evolution for multiobjective optimization problems

Abstract

The information transfer mechanism within the population is an essential factor for population‐based multiobjective optimization algorithms. An efficient leader selection strategy can effectively help the population to approach the true Pareto front. However, traditional population‐based multiobjective optimization algorithms are restricted to a single global leader and cannot transfer information efficiently. To overcome those limitations, in this paper, a multiobjective bacterial colony optimization with dynamic multi‐leader co‐evolution (MBCO/DML) is proposed, and a novel information transfer mechanism is developed within the group for adaptive evolution. Specifically, to enhance convergence and diversity, a multi‐leaders learning mechanism is designed based on a dynamically evolving elite archive via direction‐based hierarchical clustering. Finally, adaptive bacterial elimination is proposed to enable bacteria to escape from the local Pareto front according to convergence status. The results of numerical experiments show the superiority of the proposed algorithm in comparison with related population‐based multiobjective optimization algorithms on 24 frequently used benchmarks. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our dynamic leader selection in information transfer for improving both convergence and diversity to solve multiobjective optimization problems, which plays a significant role in information transfer of population evolution. Furthermore, we confirm the validity of the co‐evolution framework to the bacterial‐based optimization algorithm, greatly enhancing the searching capability for bacterial colony.