Use of Two Penalty Values in Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition

The multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) with the penalty-based boundary intersection (PBI) function (denoted as MOEA/D-PBI) has been frequently used in many studies in the literature. One essential issue in MOEA/D-PBI is its penalty parameter value specification. However, it is not easy to specify the penalty parameter value appropriately. This is because MOEA/D-PBI shows different search behavior when the penalty parameter values are different. The PBI function with a small penalty parameter value is good for convergence. However, the PBI function with a large value of penalty parameter is needed to preserve the diversity and uniformity of solutions. Although some methods for adapting the penalty parameter value for each weight vector have been proposed, they usually lead to slow convergence. In this article, we propose the idea of using two different values of penalty parameter simultaneously in MOEA/D-PBI. Although the idea is simple, the proposed algorithm is able to utilize both the convergence ability of a small penalty parameter value and the diversification ability of a large penalty parameter value of the PBI function. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works well on a wide range of test problems.