AStudyonDistributionPreservationMechanisminEMO.pdfVIP

Artif Intell Rev (2005) 23:31–56 © Springer 2005 DOI 10.1007/s10462-004-2902-3 A Study on Distribution Preservation Mechanism in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization E. F. KHOR, K. C. TAN, T. H. LEE C. K. GOH Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore 117576 Abstract. This paper reviews a number of popular distribution preservation mecha- nisms and examines their characteristics and effectiveness in evolutionary multi-objective (MO) optimization. A conceptual framework consisting of solution assessment and elitism is presented to better understand the search guidance in evo- lutionary MO optimization. Simulation studies among different distribution preser- vation techniques are performed over fifteen representative distribution samples and the performances are compared based upon two distribution metrics proposed in this paper. The results and findings reported in this paper are valuable for better understanding of the working principle and characteristics of distribution preservation mechanisms, which are very useful for incorporating different distribution preserva- tion features into MO evolutionary algorithms in a modular fashion or improving the effectiveness of existing preservation approaches. Keywords: distribution preservation, evolutionary algorithms, multi-objective optimiza- tion 1. Introduction There has been an increasing interest in applying evolutionary algo- rithms for multi-objective (MO) optimization (Coello Coello 2001), which involves finding the best possible trade-off among multiple and often competing design objectives (Deb and Goldberg 1989; Davidor