Solution of Large-Scale Many-Objective Optimization Problems Based on Dimension Reduction and Solving Knowledge-Guided Evolutionary Algorithm

There are lots of many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) in real-world applications, which often have many decision variables. Although a variety of methods have been proposed to solve MaOPs, with the increasing number of decision variables or objective functions, the performance of these algorithms deteriorates appreciably. In view of this, this article proposes a method to solve large-scale MaOPs (LSMaOPs) based on dimension reduction and a solving knowledge-guided evolutionary algorithm (KGEA). First, a dimension reduction method of objective functions is proposed. By clustering and aggregating the objective functions based on their correlation, the dimension of the original LSMaOP is effectively reduced. In addition, the correlations between the reduced objective functions are relatively low, so they can better represent different preferences. Then, we propose a solving KGEA to solve the transformed LSMaOP. In order to get a better set of initial solutions, a population initialization method by mirror partitioning the decision space is given, in which we dynamically modify the sampling probability according to the performance of solutions contained in each subdomain. At the same time, the algorithm will continuously supplement new excellent individuals using the solving knowledge obtained in the evolution of the population. To examine the performance of the proposed method, we carried out a number of comparative experiments. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can effectively tackle LSMaOPs.