Dynamic Neighborhood Adjustment Strategy for Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition

Abstract

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has achieved great success in the field of evolutionary multi-objective optimization. It decomposes a multi-objective optimization problem into a number of scalar optimization sub-problems. Each sub-problem is optimized by using information from its neighboring sub-problems. Therefore, the neighborhood size of each sub-problem plays an important role in MOEA/D. Different neighborhood sizes are tested in this paper. Experimental results demonstrate that larger neighborhood size helps achieve better convergence and diversity with more CPU time and vice versa. MOEA/D uses constant neighborhood size during the whole process, and it is difficult to balance the convergence, diversity and running time. Therefore, this paper propose an algorithm based on MOEA/D. The algorithm adjusts the neighborhood size dynamically in different generations and different sub-problems to reduce the running time while the convergence and diversity of this algorithm are similar or better than other state-of-the-art algorithms. Compared to the original MOEA/D, experimental results show that adjusting the neighborhood size dynamically is a good way to reduce the running time significantly while maintaining the convergence and diversity. Furthermore, the algorithm proposed in this paper is compared with five state-of-the-art algorithms based on MOEA/D. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the others in efficiency while performs similarly in convergence and diversity.INDEX TERMS MOEA/D, dynamic neighborhood size, diversity and convergence, running time.