An empirical study on similarity-based mating for evolutionary multiobjective combinatorial optimization

We have already proposed a similarity-based mating scheme to recombine extreme and similar parents for evolutionary multiobjective optimization. In this paper, we examine the effect of the similarity-based mating scheme on the performance of evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) algorithms. First we examine which is better between recombining similar or dissimilar parents. Next we examine the effect of biasing selection probabilities toward extreme solutions that are dissimilar from other solutions in each population. Then we examine the effect of dynamically changing the strength of this bias during the execution of EMO algorithms. Computational experiments are performed on a wide variety of test problems for multiobjective combinatorial optimization. Experimental results show that the performance of EMO algorithms can be improved by the similarity-based mating scheme for many test problems. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.