Analysis of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on the biobjective traveling salesman problem (1,2)

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms have been successfully used to deal with multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems for more than two decades. However, we know little about the performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems in theory so far, especially on NP-hard ones from real-world, since Pareto curves are often of exponential size, meanwhile, evolutionary algorithms rely heavily on the use of randomness and are hard to understand from a theoretical point of view. In this paper, we theoretically investigate the performance of two simple multiobjective evolutionary algorithms with different population diversity mechanisms on the biobjective traveling salesman problem (1,2). It is found that one of them can efficiently find a 3/2-approximation Pareto curve for the problem, the best result so far. At the same time, these two multiobjective evolutionary algorithms are proved to be superior to a multiobjective local search algorithm, and the multiobjective local search algorithm is also proven to outperform these two multiobjective evolutionary algorithms as well. Finally, the population diversity is proved to be helpful in reducing the expected runtime of multiobjective evolutionary algorithm.