NSGA-II With Simple Modification Works Well on a Wide Variety of Many-Objective Problems

Abstract

In the last two decades, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) has been the most widely-used evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithm. However, its performance on a wide variety of many-objective test problems has not been examined in the literature. It has been implicitly assumed by EMO researchers that NSGA-II does not work well on many-objective problems. As a result, NSGA-II has always been excluded from performance comparison with recently proposed many-objective EMO algorithms. Recently, it was pointed out that the performance of NSGA-II on many-objective problems is not always bad. In fact, the poor performance of NSGA-II on many-objective problems is mainly due to the existence of dominance resistant solutions. In this article, we show that the negative effect of the dominance resistant solutions can be remedied by slightly modifying objective values of many-objective problems in NSGA-II. Experimental results show that the modified NSGA-II works well on a wide variety of many-objective test problems.

Keywords

• Many-objective problems
• dominance resistant solutions
• evolutionary multi-objective optimization
• NSGA-II