Abstract
Many real-world optimization problems consist of several mutually dependent subproblems. If more than three optimization objectives are involved in the optimization process, the so-called Many-Objective Optimization is a challenge in the area of multi-objective optimization. Often, the objectives have different levels of importance that have to be considered. For this, relation \({\varepsilon }\)-\(\textit{Preferred} \) has been presented, that enables to compare and rank multi-dimensional solutions. \({\varepsilon }\)-\(\textit{Preferred} \) is controlled by a parameter \({\varepsilon }\) that has influence on the quality of the results. In this paper for the setting of the epsilon values three heuristics have been investigated. To demonstrate the behavior and efficiency of these methods an Evolutionary Algorithm for the multi-dimensional Nurse Rostering Problem is proposed. It is shown by experiments that former approaches are outperformed by heuristics that are based on self-adaptive mechanisms.
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- 1.
For the investigation of this approach the NRP has been used as application, because it consists of many objectives with different levels of priorities. There, in contrast to standard benchmarks for MOO (DTLZ [19]), the priorities are provided in the benchmark files.
- 2.
Originally the benchmarks are designed for optimization using a Weighted Sum. Thus, the weights are justified by a planner and directly given in the benchmark.
- 3.
The main reason for using NSGA-II for comparison is that it can easily be enlarged such that it can handle priorities as described in this paper. Other methods like e.g. Hype [4] are more suitable for Many-Objective Optimization, but it is not obvious how to incorporate the priorities. This is an interesting task for further developments.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank André Sülflow and Rolf Drechsler for helpful discussions and comments and for their contributions to previous work.
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Drechsler, N. (2016). Self-adaptive Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimization Based on Relation \({\varepsilon }\)-Preferred. In: Madani, K., Dourado, A., Rosa, A., Filipe, J., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Computational Intelligence. IJCCI 2013. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23392-5_2
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