A predictive strategy based on special points for evolutionary dynamic multi-objective optimization

There are some real-world problems in which multiple objectives conflict with each other and the objectives change with time. These problems require an optimization algorithm to track the moving Pareto front or Pareto set over time. In this paper, we propose a predictive strategy based on special points (SPPS) which consists of three mechanisms. The first one is that the non-dominated set is predicted directly by feed-forward center points, which can eliminate many useless individuals predicted by traditional prediction using feed-forward center points. The second one is that a special point set (such as boundary point and knee point) is introduced into the predicted population which can track Pareto front or Pareto set more accurately. The third one is the adaptive diversity maintenance mechanism based on boundary points and center points. The mechanism can introduce diverse individuals of the corresponding number according to the degree of difficulty of the problem to keep the diversity of the population. The number of these diverse individuals is strongly related to the center points. Then, they are generated evenly throughout the decision space between the boundary points. The proposed strategy is compared with the four other state-of-the-art strategies. The experimental results show that SPPS can do well for dynamic multi-objective optimization.