The value of online adaptive search: A performance comparison of NSGAII, ε-NSGAII and εMOEA

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how adaptive population-sizing and epsilon-dominance archiving can be combined with the Nondominated Sorted Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGAII) to enhance the algorithm's efficiency, reliability, and ease-of-use. Four versions of the enhanced Epsilon Dominance NSGA-II (ε-NSGAII) are tested on a standard suite of evolutionary multiobjective optimization test problems. Comparative results for the four variants of the ε-NSGAII demonstrate that adapting population size based on online changes in the epsilon dominance archive size can enhance performance. The best performing version of the ε-NSGAII is also compared to the original NSGAII and the εMOEA on the same suite of test problems. The performance of each algorithm is measured using three running performance metrics, two of which have been previously published, and one new metric proposed by the authors. Results of the study indicate that the new version of the NSGAII proposed in this paper demonstrates improved performance on the majority of two-objective test problems studied. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.