An Immune-Inspired Approach with Interval Allocation in Solving Multimodal Multi-Objective Optimization Problems with Local Pareto Sets

In practical engineering,multi-objective optimization often encounters situations where multiple Pareto sets(PS)in the decision space correspond to the same Pareto front(PF)in the objective space,known as Multi-Modal Multi-Objective Optimization Problems(MMOP).Locating multiple equivalent global PSs poses a significant challenge in real-world applications,especially considering the existence of local PSs.Effectively identifying and locating both global and local PSs is a major challenge.To tackle this issue,we introduce an immune-inspired reproduction strategy designed to produce more offspring in less crowded,promising regions and regulate the number of offspring in areas that have been thoroughly explored.This approach achieves a balanced trade-off between exploration and exploitation.Furthermore,we present an interval allocation strategy that adaptively assigns fitness levels to each antibody.This strategy ensures a broader survival margin for solutions in their initial stages and progressively amplifies the differences in individual fitness values as the population matures,thus fostering better population convergence.Additionally,we incorporate a multi-population mechanism that precisely manages each subpopulation through the interval allocation strategy,ensuring the preservation of both global and local PSs.Experimental results on 21 test problems,encompassing both global and local PSs,are compared with eight state-of-the-art multimodal multi-objective optimization algorithms.The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in simultaneously identifying global Pareto sets and locally high-quality PSs.

Enhancing Evolutionary Algorithms With Pattern Mining for Sparse Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

Sparse large-scale multi-objective optimization problems(SLMOPs)are common in science and engineering.However,the large-scale problem represents the high dimensionality of the decision space,requiring algorithms to traverse vast expanse with limited computational resources.Furthermore,in the context of sparse,most variables in Pareto optimal solutions are zero,making it difficult for algorithms to identify non-zero variables efficiently.This paper is dedicated to addressing the challenges posed by SLMOPs.To start,we introduce innovative objective functions customized to mine maximum and minimum candidate sets.This substantial enhancement dramatically improves the efficacy of frequent pattern mining.In this way,selecting candidate sets is no longer based on the quantity of nonzero variables they contain but on a higher proportion of nonzero variables within specific dimensions.Additionally,we unveil a novel approach to association rule mining,which delves into the intricate relationships between non-zero variables.This novel methodology aids in identifying sparse distributions that can potentially expedite reductions in the objective function value.We extensively tested our algorithm across eight benchmark problems and four real-world SLMOPs.The results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive solutions across various challenges.

Coevolutionary Framework for Generalized Multimodal Multi-Objective Optimization

Most multimodal multi-objective evolutionary algorithms(MMEAs)aim to find all global Pareto optimal sets(PSs)for a multimodal multi-objective optimization problem(MMOP).However,in real-world problems,decision makers(DMs)may be also interested in local PSs.Also,searching for both global and local PSs is more general in view of dealing with MMOPs,which can be seen as generalized MMOPs.Moreover,most state-of-theart MMEAs exhibit poor convergence on high-dimension MMOPs and are unable to deal with constrained MMOPs.To address the above issues,we present a novel multimodal multiobjective coevolutionary algorithm(Co MMEA)to better produce both global and local PSs,and simultaneously,to improve the convergence performance in dealing with high-dimension MMOPs.Specifically,the Co MMEA introduces two archives to the search process,and coevolves them simultaneously through effective knowledge transfer.The convergence archive assists the Co MMEA to quickly approach the Pareto optimal front.The knowledge of the converged solutions is then transferred to the diversity archive which utilizes the local convergence indicator and the-dominance-based method to obtain global and local PSs effectively.Experimental results show that Co MMEA is competitive compared to seven state-of-the-art MMEAs on fifty-four complex MMOPs.

Even Search in a Promising Region for Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization

In recent years, a large number of approaches to constrained multi-objective optimization problems(CMOPs) have been proposed, focusing on developing tweaked strategies and techniques for handling constraints. However, an overly finetuned strategy or technique might overfit some problem types,resulting in a lack of versatility. In this article, we propose a generic search strategy that performs an even search in a promising region. The promising region, determined by obtained feasible non-dominated solutions, possesses two general properties.First, the constrained Pareto front(CPF) is included in the promising region. Second, as the number of feasible solutions increases or the convergence performance(i.e., approximation to the CPF) of these solutions improves, the promising region shrinks. Then we develop a new strategy named even search,which utilizes the non-dominated solutions to accelerate convergence and escape from local optima, and the feasible solutions under a constraint relaxation condition to exploit and detect feasible regions. Finally, a diversity measure is adopted to make sure that the individuals in the population evenly cover the valuable areas in the promising region. Experimental results on 45 instances from four benchmark test suites and 14 real-world CMOPs have demonstrated that searching evenly in the promising region can achieve competitive performance and excellent versatility compared to 11 most state-of-the-art methods tailored for CMOPs.

Energy-Saving Distributed Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Optimization with Dual Resource Constraints Based on Integrated Q-Learning Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer

The distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem(DFJSP)has attracted great attention with the growth of the global manufacturing industry.General DFJSP research only considers machine constraints and ignores worker constraints.As one critical factor of production,effective utilization of worker resources can increase productivity.Meanwhile,energy consumption is a growing concern due to the increasingly serious environmental issues.Therefore,the distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem with dual resource constraints(DFJSP-DRC)for minimizing makespan and total energy consumption is studied in this paper.To solve the problem,we present a multi-objective mathematical model for DFJSP-DRC and propose a Q-learning-based multi-objective grey wolf optimizer(Q-MOGWO).In Q-MOGWO,high-quality initial solutions are generated by a hybrid initialization strategy,and an improved active decoding strategy is designed to obtain the scheduling schemes.To further enhance the local search capability and expand the solution space,two wolf predation strategies and three critical factory neighborhood structures based on Q-learning are proposed.These strategies and structures enable Q-MOGWO to explore the solution space more efficiently and thus find better Pareto solutions.The effectiveness of Q-MOGWO in addressing DFJSP-DRC is verified through comparison with four algorithms using 45 instances.The results reveal that Q-MOGWO outperforms comparison algorithms in terms of solution quality.

Immune Optimization Approach for Dynamic Constrained Multi-Objective Multimodal Optimization Problems

This work investigates one immune optimization approach for dynamic constrained multi-objective multimodal optimization in terms of biological immune inspirations and the concept of constraint dominance. Such approach includes mainly three functional modules, environmental detection, population initialization and immune evolution. The first, inspired by the function of immune surveillance, is designed to detect the change of such kind of problem and to decide the type of a new environment;the second generates an initial population for the current environment, relying upon the result of detection;the last evolves two sub-populations along multiple directions and searches those excellent and diverse candidates. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can adaptively track the environmental change and effectively find the global Pareto-optimal front in each environment.

Zoning Search With Adaptive Resource Allocating Method for Balanced and Imbalanced Multimodal Multi-Objective Optimization

Maintaining population diversity is an important task in the multimodal multi-objective optimization.Although the zoning search(ZS)can improve the diversity in the decision space,assigning the same computational costs to each search subspace may be wasteful when computational resources are limited,especially on imbalanced problems.To alleviate the above-mentioned issue,a zoning search with adaptive resource allocating(ZS-ARA)method is proposed in the current study.In the proposed ZS-ARA,the entire search space is divided into many subspaces to preserve the diversity in the decision space and to reduce the problem complexity.Moreover,the computational resources can be automatically allocated among all the subspaces.The ZS-ARA is compared with seven algorithms on two different types of multimodal multi-objective problems(MMOPs),namely,balanced and imbalanced MMOPs.The results indicate that,similarly to the ZS,the ZS-ARA achieves high performance with the balanced MMOPs.Also,it can greatly assist a“regular”algorithm in improving its performance on the imbalanced MMOPs,and is capable of allocating the limited computational resources dynamically.

A Survey of Evolutionary Algorithms for Multi-Objective Optimization Problems With Irregular Pareto Fronts

Evolutionary algorithms have been shown to be very successful in solving multi-objective optimization problems(MOPs).However,their performance often deteriorates when solving MOPs with irregular Pareto fronts.To remedy this issue,a large body of research has been performed in recent years and many new algorithms have been proposed.This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the research on MOPs with irregular Pareto fronts.We start with a brief introduction to the basic concepts,followed by a summary of the benchmark test problems with irregular problems,an analysis of the causes of the irregularity,and real-world optimization problems with irregular Pareto fronts.Then,a taxonomy of the existing methodologies for handling irregular problems is given and representative algorithms are reviewed with a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses.Finally,open challenges are pointed out and a few promising future directions are suggested.

CHARACTERIZATION OF EFFICIENT SOLUTIONS FOR MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS INVOLVING SEMI-STRONG AND GENERALIZED SEMI-STRONG E-CONVEXITY

The authors of this article are interested in characterization of efficient solutions for special classes of problems. These classes consider semi-strong E-convexity of involved functions. Sufficient and necessary conditions for a feasible solution to be an efficient or properly efficient solution are obtained.

A multi-objective optimization framework for ill-posed inverse problems

Many image inverse problems are ill-posed for no unique solutions. Most of them have incommensurable or mixed-type objectives. In this study, a multi-objective optimization framework is introduced to model such ill-posed inverse problems. The conflicting objectives are designed according to the properties of ill-posedness and certain techniques. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms have capability to optimize multiple objectives simultaneously and obtain a set of trade-off solutions. For that reason, we use multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to keep the trade-off between these objectives for image ill-posed problems. Two case studies of sparse reconstruction and change detection are imple- mented. In the case study of sparse reconstruction, the measurement error term and the sparsity term are optimized by multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, which aims at balancing the trade-off between enforcing sparsity and reducing measurement error. In the case study of image change detection, two conflicting objectives are constructed to keep the trade-off between robustness to noise and preserving the image details. Experimental results of the two case studies confirm the multi-objective optimization framework for ill-posed inverse problems in image processing is effective.

Exploring a Promising Region and Enhancing Decision Space Diversity for Multimodal Multi-Objective Optimization

During the past decade,research efforts have been gradually directed to the widely existing yet less noticed multimodal multi-objective optimization problems(MMOPs)in the multi-objective optimization community.Recently,researchers have begun to investigate enhancing the decision space diversity and preserving valuable dominated solutions to overcome the shortage caused by a preference for objective space convergence.However,many existing methods still have limitations,such as giving unduly high priorities to convergence and insufficient ability to enhance decision space diversity.To overcome these shortcomings,this article aims to explore a promising region(PR)and enhance the decision space diversity for handling MMOPs.Unlike traditional methods,we propose the use of non-dominated solutions to determine a limited region in the PR in the decision space,where the Pareto sets(PSs)are included,and explore this region to assist in solving MMOPs.Furthermore,we develop a novel neighbor distance measure that is more suitable for the complex geometry of PSs in the decision space than the crowding distance.Based on the above methods,we propose a novel dual-population-based coevolutionary algorithm.Experimental studies on three benchmark test suites demonstrates that our proposed methods can achieve promising performance and versatility on different MMOPs.The effectiveness of the proposed neighbor distance has also been justified through comparisons with crowding distance methods.

Solving material distribution routing problem in mixed manufacturing systems with a hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

The material distribution routing problem in the manufacturing system is a complex combinatorial optimization problem and its main task is to deliver materials to the working stations with low cost and high efficiency. A multi-objective model was presented for the material distribution routing problem in mixed manufacturing systems, and it was solved by a hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (HMOEA). The characteristics of the HMOEA are as follows: 1) A route pool is employed to preserve the best routes for the population initiation; 2) A specialized best?worst route crossover (BWRC) mode is designed to perform the crossover operators for selecting the best route from Chromosomes 1 to exchange with the worst one in Chromosomes 2, so that the better genes are inherited to the offspring; 3) A route swap mode is used to perform the mutation for improving the convergence speed and preserving the better gene; 4) Local heuristics search methods are applied in this algorithm. Computational study of a practical case shows that the proposed algorithm can decrease the total travel distance by 51.66%, enhance the average vehicle load rate by 37.85%, cut down 15 routes and reduce a deliver vehicle. The convergence speed of HMOEA is faster than that of famous NSGA-II.

Multi-population and diffusion UMDA for dynamic multimodal problems

In dynamic environments,it is important to track changing optimal solutions over time.Univariate marginal distribution algorithm（UMDA） which is a class algorithm of estimation of distribution algorithms attracts more and more attention in recent years.In this paper a new multi-population and diffusion UMDA（MDUMDA） is proposed for dynamic multimodal problems.The multi-population approach is used to locate multiple local optima which are useful to find the global optimal solution quickly to dynamic multimodal problems.The diffusion model is used to increase the diversity in a guided fashion,which makes the neighbor individuals of previous optimal solutions move gradually from the previous optimal solutions and enlarge the search space.This approach uses both the information of current population and the part history information of the optimal solutions.Finally experimental studies on the moving peaks benchmark are carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm and compare the performance of MDUMDA and multi-population quantum swarm optimization（MQSO） from the literature.The experimental results show that the MDUMDA is effective for the function with moving optimum and can adapt to the dynamic environments rapidly.

A Multi-Objective Optimal Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Tree-Ranking

Multi-objective optimal evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are a kind of new effective algorithms to solve Multi-objective optimal problem (MOP). Because ranking, a method which is used by most MOEAs to solve MOP, has some shortcoming s, in this paper, we proposed a new method using tree structure to express the relationship of solutions. Experiments prove that the method can reach the Pare-to front, retain the diversity of the population, and use less time.

Time variant multi-objective linear fractional interval-valued transportation problem

This paper studies a time-variant multi-objective linear fractional transportation problem. In reality, transported goods should reach in destinations within a specific time. Considering the importance of time, a time-variant multi-objective linear fractional transportation problem is formulated here. We take into account the parameters as cost, supply and demand are interval valued that involved in the proposed model, so we treat the model as a multi-objective linear fractional interval transportation problem. To solve the formulated model, we first convert it into a deterministic form using a new transformation technique and then apply fuzzy programming to solve it. The applicability of our proposed method is shown by considering two numerical examples. At last, conclusions and future research directions regarding our study is included.

Novel electromagnetism-like mechanism method for multiobjective optimization problems

As a new-style stochastic algorithm, the electromagnetism-like mechanism（EM） method gains more and more attention from many researchers in recent years. A novel model based on EM（NMEM） for multiobjective optimization problems is proposed, which regards the charge of all particles as the constraints in the current population and the measure of the uniformity of non-dominated solutions as the objective function. The charge of the particle is evaluated based on the dominated concept, and its magnitude determines the direction of a force between two particles. Numerical studies are carried out on six complex test functions and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed NMEM algorithm is a very robust method for solving the multiobjective optimization problems.

A new evolutionary algorithm for constrained optimization problems

To solve single-objective constrained optimization problems,a new population-based evolutionary algorithm with elite strategy(PEAES) is proposed with the concept of single and multi-objective optimization.Constrained functions are combined to be an objective function.During the evolutionary process,the current optimal solution is found and treated as the reference point to divide the population into three sub-populations:one feasible and two infeasible ones.Different evolutionary operations of single or multi-objective optimization are respectively performed in each sub-population with elite strategy.Thirteen famous benchmark functions are selected to evaluate the performance of PEAES in comparison of other three optimization methods.The results show the proposed method is valid in efficiency,precision and probability for solving single-objective constrained optimization problems.

A Parallel Search System for Dynamic Multi-Objective Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper introduces a parallel search system for dynamic multi-objective traveling salesman problem. We design a multi-objective TSP in a stochastic dynamic environment. This dynamic setting of the problem is very useful for routing in ad-hoc networks. The proposed search system first uses parallel processors to identify the extreme solutions of the search space for each ofk objectives individually at the same time. These solutions are merged into the so-called hit-frequency matrix E. The solutions in E are then searched by parallel processors and evaluated for dominance relationship. The search system is implemented in two different ways master-worker architecture and pipeline architecture.

A Multi-Objective Scheduling and Routing Problem for Home Health Care Services via Brain Storm Optimization

At present,home health care(HHC)has been accepted as an effective method for handling the healthcare problems of the elderly.The HHC scheduling and routing problem(HHCSRP)attracts wide concentration from academia and industrial communities.This work proposes an HHCSRP considering several care centers,where a group of customers(i.e.,patients and the elderly)require being assigned to care centers.Then,various kinds of services are provided by caregivers for customers in different regions.By considering the skill matching,customers’appointment time,and caregivers’workload balancing,this article formulates an optimization model with multiple objectives to achieve minimal service cost and minimal delay cost.To handle it,we then introduce a brain storm optimization method with particular multi-objective search mechanisms(MOBSO)via combining with the features of the investigated HHCSRP.Moreover,we perform experiments to test the effectiveness of the designed method.Via comparing the MOBSO with two excellent optimizers,the results confirm that the developed method has significant superiority in addressing the considered HHCSRP.

Non-dominated Sorting Advanced Butterfly Optimization Algorithm for Multi-objective Problems

This paper uses the Butterfly Optimization Algorithm(BOA)with dominated sorting and crowding distance mechanisms to solve multi-objective optimization problems.There is also an improvement to the original version of BOA to alleviate its drawbacks before extending it into a multi-objective version.Due to better coverage and a well-distributed Pareto front,non-dominant rankings are applied to the modified BOA using the crowding distance strategy.Seven benchmark functions and eight real-world problems have been used to test the performance of multi-objective non-dominated advanced BOA(MONSBOA),including unconstrained,constrained,and real-world design multiple-objective,highly nonlinear constraint problems.Various performance metrics,such as Generational Distance(GD),Inverted Generational Distance(IGD),Maximum Spread(MS),and Spacing(S),have been used for performance comparison.It is demonstrated that the new MONSBOA algorithm is better than the compared algorithms in more than 80%occasions in solving problems with a variety of linear,nonlinear,continuous,and discrete characteristics based on the Pareto front when compared quantitatively.From all the analysis,it may be concluded that the suggested MONSBOA is capable of producing high-quality Pareto fronts with very competitive results with rapid convergence.