A many-objective optimisation decision-making process applied to automotive diesel engine calibration

Abstract

A novel process has been developed for reducing complexity in real-world, high-dimensional, multi-objective optimisation problems. This approach relies on being able to identify and exploit local harmony between objectives to reduce dimensionality. To achieve this, a systematic and modular process has been designed to cluster the Pareto-optimal front and apply a rule-based Principal Component Analysis including preference articulation for potential objective reduction. This many-objective optimisation decision-making process is demonstrated on a real-world, automotive diesel engine calibration optimisation problem comprising six objectives. The complexity reduction process resulted in three- and four-objective sub-problems. In the former, a significant improvement was achieved in one of the retained objectives at very little cost to the others. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.