A fast and effective method for pruning of non-dominated solutions in many-objective problems

Abstract

Diversity maintenance of solutions is an essential part in multi-objective optimization. Existing techniques are suboptimal either in the sense of obtained distribution or execution time. This paper proposes an effective and relatively fast method for pruning a set of nondominated solutions. The proposed method is based on a crowding estimation technique using nearest neighbors of solutions in Euclidean sense, and a technique for finding these nearest neighbors quickly. The method is experimentally evaluated, and results indicate a good trade-off between the obtained distribution and execution time. Distribution is good also in many-objective problems, when number of objectives is more than two. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.