NPGA for Aircraft Technology Selection Process

Design of any complex system entails many objectives to reach and constraints to satisfy. This multi–objective nature of the problem ensures that the technology solution is always a compromise between conflicting objectives. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of Niched Pareto genetic algorithm as a relatively fast and straightforward method for obtaining technology sets that are distributed along the Pareto frontier in objective space. In this implementation, the genetic algorithm is wrapped around a technology evaluation environment to efficiently evaluate various technology combinations. Some of the major challenges include formulation of Pareto domination tournament and sharing function of Niched Pareto genetic algorithm for a technology selection problem, extracting Pareto front from population of the final generation and visualizing the results.