On the effects of adding objectives to plateau functions

  • Authors:

  • Dimo Brockhoff;Tobias Friedrich;Nils Hebbinghaus;Christian Klein;Frank Neumann;Eckart Zitzler

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, Elgenössiche Technische Hochschule Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;Algorithm Group at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA;Algorithms and Complexity at Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;Algorithms and Complexity at Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;Algorithms and Complexity at Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, Elgenössiche Technische Hochschule Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we examine how adding objectives to a given optimization problem affects the computational effort required to generate the set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Experimental studies show that additional objectives may change the running time behavior of an algorithm drastically. Often it is assumed that more objectives make a problem harder as the number of different tradeoffs may increase with the problem dimension. We show that additional objectives, however, may be both beneficial and obstructive depending on the chosen objective. Our results are obtained by rigorous running time analyses that show the different effects of adding objectives to a well-known plateau function. Additional experiments show that the theoretically shown behavior can be observed for problems with more than one objective.