An MOEA/D-ACO with PBI for Many-Objective Optimization

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are an important instrument for solving the multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). It has been observed that the combined ant colony (MOEA/D-ACO) based on decomposition is very promising for MOPs. However, as the number of optimization objectives increases, the selection pressure will be released, leading to a significant reduction in the performance of the algorithm. It is a significant problem and challenge in the MOEA/D-ACO to maintain the balance between convergence and diversity in many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). In the proposed algorithm, an MOEA/D-ACO with the penalty based boundary intersection distance (PBI) method (MOEA/D-ACO-PBI) is intended to solve the MaOPs. PBI decomposes the problems with many single-objective problems, a weighted vector adjustment method based on clustering, and uses different pheromone matrices to solve different single objectives proposed. Then the solutions are constructed and pheromone was updated. Experimental results on both CF1-CF4 and suits of C-DTLZ benchmarks problems demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in comparison with three state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both convergence and diversity.