Pareto archived dynamically dimensioned search with hypervolume-based selection for multi-objective optimization

Pareto archived dynamically dimensioned search (PA-DDS) is a parsimonious multi-objective optimization algorithm with only one parameter to diminish the user's effort for fine-tuning algorithm parameters. This study demonstrates that hypervolume contribution (HVC) is a very effective selection metric for PA-DDS and Monte Carlo sampling-based HVC is very effective for higher dimensional problems (five objectives in this study). PA-DDS with HVC performs comparably to algorithms commonly applied to water resources problems (E-NSGAII and AMALGAM under recommended parameter values). Comparisons on the CEC09 competition show that with sufficient computational budget, PA-DDS with HVC performs comparably to 13 benchmark algorithms and shows improved relative performance as the number of objectives increases. Lastly, it is empirically demonstrated that the total optimization runtime of PA-DDS with HVC is dominated (90% or higher) by solution evaluation runtime whenever evaluation exceeds 10 seconds/solution. Therefore, optimization algorithm runtime associated with the unbounded archive of PA-DDS is negligible in solving computationally intensive problems.