A new method to solve generalized multicriteria optimization problems using the simple genetic algorithm

Multi-objective liver cancer algorithm: A novel algorithm for solving engineering design problems

This research introduces the Multi-Objective Liver Cancer Algorithm (MOLCA), a novel approach inspired by the growth and proliferation patterns of liver tumors. MOLCA emulates the evolutionary tendencies of liver tumors, leveraging their expansion dynamics as a model for solving multi-objective optimization problems in engineering design. The algorithm uniquely combines genetic operators with the Random Opposition-Based Learning (ROBL) strategy, optimizing both local and global search capabilities. Further enhancement is achieved through the integration of elitist non-dominated sorting (NDS), information feedback mechanism (IFM) and Crowding Distance (CD) selection method, which collectively aim to efficiently identify the Pareto optimal front. The performance of MOLCA is rigorously assessed using a comprehensive set of standard multi-objective test benchmarks, including ZDT, DTLZ and various Constraint (CONSTR, TNK, SRN, BNH, OSY and KITA) and real-world engineering design problems like Brushless DC wheel motor, Safety isolating transformer, Helical spring, Two-bar truss and Welded beam. Its efficacy is benchmarked against prominent algorithms such as the non-dominated sorting grey wolf optimizer (NSGWO), multiobjective multi-verse optimization (MOMVO), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) and multiobjective marine predator algorithm (MOMPA). Quantitative analysis is conducted using GD, IGD, SP, SD, HV and RT metrics to represent convergence and distribution, while qualitative aspects are presented through graphical representations of the Pareto fronts. The MOLCA source code is available at: https://github.com/kanak02/MOLCA.

Efficient implicit constraint handling approaches for constrained optimization problems

Many real-world optimization problems, particularly engineering ones, involve constraints that make finding a feasible solution challenging. Numerous researchers have investigated this challenge for constrained single- and multi-objective optimization problems. In particular, this work extends the boundary update (BU) method proposed by Gandomi and Deb (Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Eng. 363:112917, 2020) for the constrained optimization problem. BU is an implicit constraint handling technique that aims to cut the infeasible search space over iterations to find the feasible region faster. In doing so, the search space is twisted, which can make the optimization problem more challenging. In response, two switching mechanisms are implemented that transform the landscape along with the variables to the original problem when the feasible region is found. To achieve this objective, two thresholds, representing distinct switching methods, are taken into account. In the first approach, the optimization process transitions to a state without utilizing the BU approach when constraint violations reach zero. In the second method, the optimization process shifts to a BU method-free optimization phase when there is no further change observed in the objective space. To validate, benchmarks and engineering problems are considered to be solved with well-known evolutionary single- and multi-objective optimization algorithms. Herein, the proposed method is benchmarked using with and without BU approaches over the whole search process. The results show that the proposed method can significantly boost the solutions in both convergence speed and finding better solutions for constrained optimization problems.

Multi-objective exponential distribution optimizer (MOEDO): a novel math-inspired multi-objective algorithm for global optimization and real-world engineering design problems

The exponential distribution optimizer (EDO) represents a heuristic approach, capitalizing on exponential distribution theory to identify global solutions for complex optimization challenges. This study extends the EDO's applicability by introducing its multi-objective version, the multi-objective EDO (MOEDO), enhanced with elite non-dominated sorting and crowding distance mechanisms. An information feedback mechanism (IFM) is integrated into MOEDO, aiming to balance exploration and exploitation, thus improving convergence and mitigating the stagnation in local optima, a notable limitation in traditional approaches. Our research demonstrates MOEDO's superiority over renowned algorithms such as MOMPA, NSGA-II, MOAOA, MOEA/D and MOGNDO. This is evident in 72.58% of test scenarios, utilizing performance metrics like GD, IGD, HV, SP, SD and RT across benchmark test collections (DTLZ, ZDT and various constraint problems) and five real-world engineering design challenges. The Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test (WRST) further confirms MOEDO as a competitive multi-objective optimization algorithm, particularly in scenarios where existing methods struggle with balancing diversity and convergence efficiency. MOEDO's robust performance, even in complex real-world applications, underscores its potential as an innovative solution in the optimization domain. The MOEDO source code is available at: https://github.com/kanak02/MOEDO .

Multi-objective chaos game optimization

The Chaos Game Optimization (CGO) has only recently gained popularity, but its effective searching capabilities have a lot of potential for addressing single-objective optimization issues. Despite its advantages, this method can only tackle problems formulated with one objective. The multi-objective CGO proposed in this study is utilized to handle the problems with several objectives (MOCGO). In MOCGO, Pareto-optimal solutions are stored in a fixed-sized external archive. In addition, the leader selection functionality needed to carry out multi-objective optimization has been included in CGO. The technique is also applied to eight real-world engineering design challenges with multiple objectives. The MOCGO algorithm uses several mathematical models in chaos theory and fractals inherited from CGO. This algorithm's performance is evaluated using seventeen case studies, such as CEC-09, ZDT, and DTLZ. Six well-known multi-objective algorithms are compared with MOCGO using four different performance metrics. The results demonstrate that the suggested method is better than existing ones. These Pareto-optimal solutions show excellent convergence and coverage.

Handling Constrained Multiobjective Optimization Problems via Bidirectional Coevolution

Constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs) involve both conflicting objective functions and various constraints. Due to the presence of constraints, CMOPs' Pareto-optimal solutions are very likely lying on constraint boundaries. The experience from the constrained single-objective optimization has shown that to quickly obtain such an optimal solution, the search should surround the boundary of the feasible region from both the feasible and infeasible sides. In this article, we extend this idea to cope with CMOPs and, accordingly, we propose a novel constrained multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with bidirectional coevolution, called BiCo. BiCo maintains two populations, that is: 1) the main population and 2) the archive population. To update the main population, the constraint-domination principle is equipped with an NSGA-II variant to move the population into the feasible region and then to guide the population toward the Pareto front (PF) from the feasible side of the search space. While for updating the archive population, a nondominated sorting procedure and an angle-based selection scheme are conducted in sequence to drive the population toward the PF within the infeasible region while maintaining good diversity. As a result, BiCo can get close to the PF from two complementary directions. In addition, to coordinate the interaction between the main and archive populations, in BiCo, a restricted mating selection mechanism is developed to choose appropriate mating parents. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on three sets of CMOP benchmark functions and six real-world CMOPs. The experimental results suggest that BiCo can obtain quite competitive performance in comparison to eight state-of-the-art-constrained multiobjective evolutionary optimizers.

Multi-Objective UAV Trajectory Planning in Uncertain Environment

UAV trajectory planning is one of the research focuses in artificial intelligence and UAV technology. The asymmetric information, however, will lead to the uncertainty of the UAV trajectory planning; the probability theory as the most commonly used method to solve the trajectory planning problem in uncertain environment will lead to unrealistic conclusions under the condition of lacking samples, while the uncertainty theory based on uncertain measures is an efficient method to solve such problems. Firstly, the uncertainties in trajectory planning are sufficiently considered in this paper; the fuel consumption, concealment and threat degree with uncertain variables are taken as the objective functions; the constraints are analyzed according to the maneuverability; and the uncertain multi-objective trajectory planning (UMOTP) model is established. After that, this paper takes both the long-term benefits and its stability into account, and then, the expected-value and standard-deviation efficient trajectory model is established. What is more, this paper solves the Pareto front of the trajectory planning, satisfying various preferences, which avoids the defects of the trajectory obtained by traditional model only applicable to a certain specific situation. In order to obtain a better solution set, this paper proposes an improved backbones particle swarm optimization algorithm based on PSO and NSGA-II, which overcomes the shortcomings of the traditional algorithm such as premature convergence and poor robustness, and the efficiency of the algorithm is tested. Finally, the algorithm is applied to the UMOTP problem; then, the optimal trajectory set is obtained, and the effectiveness and reliability of the model is verified.

The Pareto Tracer for General Inequality Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

Problems where several incommensurable objectives have to be optimized concurrently arise in many engineering and financial applications. Continuation methods for the treatment of such multi-objective optimization methods (MOPs) are very efficient if all objectives are continuous since in that case one can expect that the solution set forms at least locally a manifold. Recently, the Pareto Tracer (PT) has been proposed, which is such a multi-objective continuation method. While the method works reliably for MOPs with box and equality constraints, no strategy has been proposed yet to adequately treat general inequalities, which we address in this work. We formulate the extension of the PT and present numerical results on some selected benchmark problems. The results indicate that the new method can indeed handle general MOPs, which greatly enhances its applicability.

A Method and Device for Detecting the Number of Magnetic Nanoparticles Based on Weak Magnetic Signal

In recent years, magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have been widely used as a new material in biomedicine and other fields due to their broad versatility, and the quantitative detection method of MNPs is significantly important due to its advantages in immunoassay and single-molecule detection. In this study, a method and device for detecting the number of MNPs based on weak magnetic signal were proposed and machine learning methods were applied to the design of MNPs number detection method and optimization of detection device. Genetic Algorithm was used to optimize the MNPs detection platform and Simulated Annealing Neural Network was used to explore the relationship between different positions of magnetic signals and the number of MNPs so as to obtain the optimal measurement position of MNPs. Finally, Radial Basis Function Neural Network, Simulated Annealing Neural Network, and partial least squares multivariate regression analysis were used to establish the MNPs number detection model, respectively. Experimental results show that Simulated Annealing Neural Network model is the best among the three models with detection accuracy of 98.22%, mean absolute error of 0.8545, and root mean square error of 1.5134. The results also indicate that the method and device for detecting the number of MNPs provide a basis for further research on MNPs for the capture and content analysis of specific analyte and to obtain other related information, which has significant potential in various applications.

Difficulty Adjustable and Scalable Constrained Multiobjective Test Problem Toolkit

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have progressed significantly in recent decades, but most of them are designed to solve unconstrained multiobjective optimization problems. In fact, many real-world multiobjective problems contain a number of constraints. To promote research on constrained multiobjective optimization, we first propose a problem classification scheme with three primary types of difficulty, which reflect various types of challenges presented by real-world optimization problems, in order to characterize the constraint functions in constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs). These are feasibility-hardness, convergence-hardness, and diversity-hardness. We then develop a general toolkit to construct difficulty adjustable and scalable CMOPs (DAS-CMOPs, or DAS-CMaOPs when the number of objectives is greater than three) with three types of parameterized constraint functions developed to capture the three proposed types of difficulty. In fact, the combination of the three primary constraint functions with different parameters allows the construction of a large variety of CMOPs, with difficulty that can be defined by a triplet, with each of its parameters specifying the level of one of the types of primary difficulty. Furthermore, the number of objectives in this toolkit can be scaled beyond three. Based on this toolkit, we suggest nine difficulty adjustable and scalable CMOPs and nine CMaOPs, to be called DAS-CMOP1-9 and DAS-CMaOP1-9, respectively. To evaluate the proposed test problems, two popular CMOEAs-MOEA/D-CDP (MOEA/D with constraint dominance principle) and NSGA-II-CDP (NSGA-II with constraint dominance principle) and two popular constrained many-objective evolutionary algorithms (CMaOEAs)-C-MOEA/DD and C-NSGA-III-are used to compare performance on DAS-CMOP1-9 and DAS-CMaOP1-9 with a variety of difficulty triplets, respectively. The experimental results reveal that mechanisms in MOEA/D-CDP may be more effective in solving convergence-hard DAS-CMOPs, while mechanisms of NSGA-II-CDP may be more effective in solving DAS-CMOPs with simultaneous diversity-, feasibility-, and convergence-hardness. Mechanisms in C-NSGA-III may be more effective in solving feasibility-hard CMaOPs, while mechanisms of C-MOEA/DD may be more effective in solving CMaOPs with convergence-hardness. In addition, none of them can solve these problems efficiently, which stimulates us to continue to develop new CMOEAs and CMaOEAs to solve the suggested DAS-CMOPs and DAS-CMaOPs.

Constrained Multiobjective Optimization Algorithm Based on Immune System Model

An immune optimization algorithm, based on the model of biological immune system, is proposed to solve multiobjective optimization problems with multimodal nonlinear constraints. First, the initial population is divided into feasible nondominated population and infeasible/dominated population. The feasible nondominated individuals focus on exploring the nondominated front through clone and hypermutation based on a proposed affinity design approach, while the infeasible/dominated individuals are exploited and improved via the simulated binary crossover and polynomial mutation operations. And then, to accelerate the convergence of the proposed algorithm, a transformation technique is applied to the combined population of the above two offspring populations. Finally, a crowded-comparison strategy is used to create the next generation population. In numerical experiments, a series of benchmark constrained multiobjective optimization problems are considered to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and it is also compared to several state-of-art algorithms in terms of the inverted generational distance and hypervolume indicators. The results indicate that the new method achieves competitive performance and even statistically significant better results than previous algorithms do on most of the benchmark suite.

ASMiGA: an archive-based steady-state micro genetic algorithm

We propose a new archive-based steady-state micro genetic algorithm (ASMiGA). In this context, a new archive maintenance strategy is proposed, which maintains a set of nondominated solutions in the archive unless the archive size falls below a minimum allowable size. It makes the archive size adaptive and dynamic. We have proposed a new environmental selection strategy and a new mating selection strategy. The environmental selection strategy reduces the exploration in less probable objective spaces. The mating selection increases searching in more probable search regions by enhancing the exploitation of existing solutions. A new crossover strategy DE-3 is proposed here. ASMiGA is compared with five well-known multiobjective optimization algorithms of different types-generational evolutionary algorithms (SPEA2 and NSGA-II), archive-based hybrid scatter search, decomposition-based evolutionary approach, and archive-based micro genetic algorithm. For comparison purposes, four performance measures (HV, GD, IGD, and GS) are used on 33 test problems, of which seven problems are constrained. The proposed algorithm outperforms the other five algorithms.

Constrained multiobjective biogeography optimization algorithm

Multiobjective optimization involves minimizing or maximizing multiple objective functions subject to a set of constraints. In this study, a novel constrained multiobjective biogeography optimization algorithm (CMBOA) is proposed. It is the first biogeography optimization algorithm for constrained multiobjective optimization. In CMBOA, a disturbance migration operator is designed to generate diverse feasible individuals in order to promote the diversity of individuals on Pareto front. Infeasible individuals nearby feasible region are evolved to feasibility by recombining with their nearest nondominated feasible individuals. The convergence of CMBOA is proved by using probability theory. The performance of CMBOA is evaluated on a set of 6 benchmark problems and experimental results show that the CMBOA performs better than or similar to the classical NSGA-II and IS-MOEA.

Archive of Useful Solutions for Directed Mating in Evolutionary Constrained Multiobjective Optimization

As an evolutionary approach to solve multi-objective optimization problems involving several constraints, recently a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) using two-stage non-dominated sorting and directed mating (TNSDM) has been proposed. In TNSDM, directed mating utilizes infeasible solutions dominating feasible solutions in the objective space to generate offspring. In our previous studies, significant contribution of directed mating to the improvement of the search performancewas verified on several benchmark problems. However, in the conventional TNSDM, infeasible solutions utilized in directed mating are discarded in the selection process of parents (elites) population and cannot be utilized in the next generation. TNSDM has potential to further improve the search performance by archiving useful solutions for directed mating to the next generation and repeatedly utilizing them in directed mating. To further improve effects of directed mating in TNSDM, in this work, we propose an archiving strategy of useful solutions for directed mating. We verify the search performance of TNSDM using the proposed archive by varying the size of archive, and compare its search performance with the conventional CNSGA-II and RTS onmobjectiveskknapsacks problems. As results, we show that the search performance of TNSDM is improved by introducing the proposed archive in aspects of diversity of the obtained solutions in the objective space and convergence of solutions toward the optimal Pareto front.

D2MOPSO: MOPSO based on decomposition and dominance with archiving using crowding distance in objective and solution spaces

This paper improves a recently developed multi-objective particle swarm optimizer (D2MOPSO) that incorporates dominance with decomposition used in the context of multi-objective optimization. Decomposition simplifies a multi-objective problem (MOP) by transforming it to a set of aggregation problems, whereas dominance plays a major role in building the leaders' archive. D2MOPSO introduces a new archiving technique that facilitates attaining better diversity and coverage in both objective and solution spaces. The improved method is evaluated on standard benchmarks including both constrained and unconstrained test problems, by comparing it with three state of the art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms: MOEA/D, OMOPSO, and dMOPSO. The comparison and analysis of the experimental results, supported by statistical tests, indicate that the proposed algorithm is highly competitive, efficient, and applicable to a wide range of multi-objective optimization problems.

A Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimizer for Constrained Optimization

Constraint handling techniques are mainly designed for evolutionary algorithms to solve constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs). Most multiojective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) designs adopt these existing constraint handling techniques to deal with CMOPs. In the proposed constrained MOPSO, information related to particles’ infeasibility and feasibility status is utilized effectively to guide the particles to search for feasible solutions and improve the quality of the optimal solution. This information is incorporated into the four main procedures of a standard MOPSO algorithm. The involved procedures include the updating of personal best archive based on the particles’ Pareto ranks and their constraint violation values; the adoption of infeasible global best archives to store infeasible nondominated solutions; the adjustment of acceleration constants that depend on the personal bests’ and selected global best’s infeasibility and feasibility status; and the integration of personal bests’ feasibility status to estimate the mutation rate in the mutation procedure. Simulation to investigate the proposed constrained MOPSO in solving the selected benchmark problems is conducted. The simulation results indicate that the proposed constrained MOPSO is highly competitive in solving most of the selected benchmark problems.