A new uniform evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition and CDAS for many-objective optimization

The convergence and the diversity are two main goals of an evolutionary algorithm for many-objective optimization problems. However, achieving these two goals simultaneously is the difficult and challenging work for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. A uniform evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition and the control of dominance area of solutions (CDAS) is proposed to achieve these two goals. Firstly, a uniform design method is utilized to generate the weight vectors whose distribution is uniform over the design space, then the initial population is classified into some sub-populations by these weight vectors. Secondly, an update strategy based on decomposition is proposed to maintain the diversity of obtained solutions. Thirdly, to improve the convergence, a crossover operator based on the uniform design method is constructed to enhance the search capacity and the CDAS is used to sort solutions of each sub-population to guide the search process to converge the Pareto optimal solutions. Moreover, the proposed algorithm compare with some efficient state-of-the-art algorithms, e.g., NSGAII-CDAS, MOEA/D, UMOEA/D and HypE, on six benchmark functions with 5–25 objectives are made, and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to obtain solutions with better convergence and diversity. 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.