A Subspace Sparsity-Driven Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Dynamic Constrained Multiobjective Optimization

Dynamic constrained multiobjective optimization problems (DCMOPs) require algorithms to quickly track the feasible Pareto optima under dynamic environments. The existing dynamic constrained multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (DCMOEAs) normally focus on the convergence speed, but cannot well guarantee distribution. To address this issue, a subspace sparsity driven knowledge transfer strategy based DCMOEA is developed in this article, called SSDKT. First, reference points are introduced to partition objective space into multiple subspaces. Subsequently, the feasibility of each subspace is determined by the distribution of all historical feasible optimal solutions in it, and defined as the sparsity of subspace. A predictor based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) network is further constructed to estimate the sparsity under the future environment. Once a new environment appears, a subspace transfer strategy is designed to generate an initial population. In each feasible subspace, the GRU-based prediction method is developed and competed with Kalman filter to generate the initial solution under the new environment. Based on the predicted solution of the nearest feasible neighbor, a potential initial individual in each infeasible subspace is produced by transferring the corresponding knowledge. The experimental results on various benchmarks verify that, compared with several state-of-the-art DCMOEAs, the proposed algorithm achieves the most competitive performance in solving DCMOPs.