A many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on vector angle distance scaling

Abstract

In the past two decades, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have achieved great success in solving two or three multi-objective optimization problems. As pointed out in some recent studies, however, MOEAs face many difficulties when dealing with many-objective optimization problems(MaOPs) on account of the loss of the selection pressure of the non-dominant candidate solutions toward the Pareto front and the ineffective design of the diversity maintenance mechanism. This paper proposes a many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on vector guidance. In this algorithm, the value of vector angle distance scaling(VADS) is applied to balance convergence and diversity in environmental selection. In addition, tournament selection based on the aggregate fitness value of VADS is applied to generate a high quality offspring population. Besides, we adopt an adaptive strategy to adjust the reference vector dynamically according to the scales of the objective functions. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with five state-of-the-art many-objective evolutionary algorithms on 52 instances of 13 MaOPs with diverse characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs competitively when dealing many-objective with different types of Pareto front.