Dynamic Crowding Distance-A New Diversity Maintenance Strategy for MOEAs


Abstract

In multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), the diversity of Pareto front (PF) is significant. For good diversity can provide more reasonable choices to decision-makers. The diversity of PF includes the span and the uniformity. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic crowding distance (DCD) based diversity maintenance strategy (DMS) (DCD-DMS), in which individual's DCD are computed based on the difference degree between the crowding distances of different objectives. The propose strategy computes individuals' DCD dynamically during the process of population maintenance. Through experiments on 9 test problems, the results demonstrate that DCD can improve diversity at a high level compared with two popular MOEAs: NSGA-II and epsilon-MOEA.