On the effect of populations in evolutionary multi-objective optimization

  • Authors:
  • Oliver Giel;Per Kristian Lehre

  • Affiliations:
  • Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany;Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have become increasingly popular as multi-objective problem solving techniques. An important open problem is to understand the role of populations in MOEAs. We present a simple bi-objective problem which emphasizes when populations are needed. Rigorous runtime analysis point out an exponential runtime gap between the population-based algorithm Simple Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimizer (SEMO) and several single individual-based algorithms on this problem. This means that among the algorithms considered, only the population-based MOEA is successful and all other algorithms fail.