Controlling Dominance Area of Solutions in Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms and Performance Analysis on Multiobjective 0/1 Knapsack Problems

Abstract

This work proposes a method to control the dominance area of solutions in order to induce appropriate ranking of solutions for the problem at hand, enhance selection, and improve the performance of MOEAs on combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed method can control the degree of expansion or contraction of the dominance area of solutions using a user-defined parameter S. Modifying the dominance area of solutions changes their dominance relation inducing a ranking of solutions that is different to conventional dominance. In this work we use 0/1 multiobjective knapsack problems to analyze the effects on solutions ranking caused by contracting and expanding the dominance area of solutions and its impact on the search performance of a multi-objective optimizer when the number of objectives, the size of the search space, and the feasibility of the problems vary. We show that either convergence or diversity can be emphasized by contracting or expanding the dominance area. Also, we show that the optimal value of the area of dominance depends strongly on all factors analyzed here: number of objectives, size of the search space, and feasibility of the problems.