Adjustment of weight vectors of penalty-based boundary intersection method in MOEA/D

Abstract

Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) is one of the dominant algorithmic frameworks for multi-objective optimization in the area of evolutionary computation. The performance of multi-objective algorithms based on MOEA/D framework highly depends on how a diverse set of single objective subproblems are generated. Among all decomposition methods, the Penalty-based Boundary Intersection (PBI) method has received particular research interest in MOEA/D due to its ability for controlling the diversity of population for many-objective optimization. However, optimizing multiple PBI subproblems defined via a set of uniformly-distributed weight vectors may not be able to produce a good approximation of Pareto-optimal front when objectives have different scales. To overcome this weakness, we suggest a new strategy for adjusting weight vectors of PBI-based subproblems in this paper. Our experimental results have shown that the performance of MOEA/D-PBI with adjusted weight vectors is competitive to NSGA-III in diversity when dealing with the scaled version of some benchmark multi-objective test problems.