Effects of diversity control in single-objective and multi-objective genetic algorithms

This paper covers an investigation on the effects of diversity control in the search performances of single-objective and multi-objective genetic algorithms. The diversity control is achieved by means of eliminating duplicated individuals in the population and dictating the survival of non-elite individuals via either a deterministic or a stochastic selection scheme. In the case of single-objective genetic algorithm, onemax and royal road R1 functions are used during benchmarking. In contrast, various multi-objective benchmark problems with specific characteristics are utilised in the case of multi-objective genetic algorithm. The results indicate that the use of diversity control with a correct parameter setting helps to prevent premature convergence in single-objective optimisation. Furthermore, the use of diversity control also promotes the emergence of multi-objective solutions that are close to the true Pareto optimal solutions while maintaining a uniform solution distribution along the Pareto front.