A robust environmental selection strategy in decomposition based many-objective optimization

Many researchers witness the efficiency of decomposition-based evolutionary multi- and many-objective optimization algorithms in finding quality solutions on problems with regular Pareto front. These decomposition-based evolutionary approaches profoundly depend on aggregation methods and weight vectors. Such algorithms fail to guarantee the diversity in the population, especially when dealing with irregular Pareto front, because some of the weight vectors become ineffective during simulation. Efforts are being made over time to frequently adopt the position of weight vectors at the rate of increased computation burden, in order to achieve improved solutions. Hence an alternative mechanism has been suggested in this paper. Instead of changing the weight vector, a better treatment on environmental selection is proposed that could effectively balance both convergence and diversity in solving both multi- and many-objective optimization problems. The higher rate of performance of the proposed algorithm has been validated over the comparative permanence with six popular state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of hypervolume, complemented with winning ratio using t-test. It is concluded in the latter part of this paper that the proposed method performs better while solving test suite problems with irregular Pareto fronts. Moreover, it is more prone towards better solutions with an increase in the number of objective functions in MaOPs.