Indicator-Based Cooperative Coevolution for Multi-objective Optimization


Abstract

Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCAs) are extensions of traditional Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) that have a lot of potential in addressing some problems on which EAs tend to perform poorly. They have become an important area of research in the field of evolutionary computation and since the cooperative coevolutionary framework has been extended to multi-objective optimization, a number of approaches have been proposed incorporating the CCA framework to improve the performance of multi-objective EAs. The advantage of cooperative coevolutionary algorithms is the decomposition of the problem they use, which allows us to learn different parts of the problem instead of the whole problem at once. Cooperative coevolution has a symbiotic approach that evolves species populations (each one managing a part of the problem) which are evaluated based on how well they perform together. In order to form a solution, an individual from each species is selected and combined with the other selected individuals. The solution is then evaluated and the individuals that make up the solution are scored based on the fitness of the combined solution. Selection for collaboration is a main issue in cooperative coevolutionary framework. However, the usual approach that has been used in Cooperative Coevolutionary Multi-objective EAs (CCMOEAs) is a method based on Pareto optimality. In this work we present a novel collaboration formation mechanism for CCMOEAs based on the use of the hypervolume indicator. Our preliminary results confirm the impact that collaboration mechanism has on the performance of CCMOEAs and indicate that the proposed framework clearly improve the results over a CCMOEA whose selection mechanism for collaboration is based on Pareto optimality.