Comparison of synchronous and asynchronous parallelization of extreme surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

This paper investigates the integration of a surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) and a parallel computation scheme to reduce the computing time until obtaining the optimal solutions in evolutionary algorithms (EAs). A surrogate-assisted MOEA solves multi-objective optimization problems while estimating the evaluation of solutions with a surrogate function. A surrogate function is produced by a machine learning model. This paper uses an extreme learning surrogate-assisted MOEA/D (ELMOEA/D), which utilizes one of the well-known MOEA algorithms, MOEA/D, and a machine learning technique, extreme learning machine (ELM). A parallelization of MOEA, on the other hand, evaluates solutions in parallel on multiple computing nodes to accelerate the optimization process. We consider a synchronous and an asynchronous parallel MOEA as a master-slave parallelization scheme for ELMOEA/D. We carry out an experiment with multi-objective optimization problems to compare the synchronous parallel ELMOEA/D with the asynchronous parallel ELMOEA/D. In the experiment, we simulate two settings of the evaluation time of solutions. One determines the evaluation time of solutions by the normal distribution with different variances. On the other hand, another evaluation time correlates to the objective function value. We compare the quality of solutions obtained by the parallel ELMOEA/D variants within a particular computing time. The experimental results show that the parallelization of ELMOEA/D significantly reduces the computational time. In addition, the integration of ELMOEA/D with the asynchronous parallelization scheme obtains higher quality of solutions quicker than the synchronous parallel ELMOEA/D.