Adaptive Multiobjective Differential Evolution With Reference Axis Vicinity Mechanism

Due to the simple but effective search framework, differential evolution (DE) has achieved successful applications in multiobjective optimization problems. However, most of the previous research on the multiobjective DE (MODE) focused on the design of control strategies of parameters and mutation operators for a given population at each generation, and ignored that the given population might have a bad distribution in the objective space. Therefore, this paper proposes a new variant of MODE in which a reference axis vicinity mechanism (RAVM) is developed to restore the good distribution of the given population and maintain its convergence before the evolution (i.e., mutation, crossover, and selection) starts at each generation. Besides the RAVM, a hybrid control strategy of parameters and mutation operators is also presented to accelerate convergence by integrating both randomness and guided information derived from solutions generated during the search process. Computational results on four series of benchmark problems illustrate that the proposed MODE with the RAVM and hybrid control strategy is competitive or even superior to some state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms in the literature.