Population Sizing of Evolutionary Large-Scale Multiobjective Optimization

Abstract

Large-scale multiobjective optimization problems (LSMOPs) are emerging and widely existed in real-world applications, which involve a large number of decision variables and multiple conflicting objectives. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are naturally suitable for multiobjective optimization due to their population-based property, allowing the search of optima simultaneously. Nevertheless, LSMOPs are challenging for conventional EAs, mainly due to the huge volume of search space in LSMOPs. Thus, it is important to explore the impact of the population sizing on the performance of conventional multiobjective EAs (MOEAs) in solving LSMOPs. In this work, we compare several representative MOEAs with different settings of population sizes on some transformer ratio error estimation (TREE) problems in the power system. These test cases are defined on combinations of three population sizes, three TREE problems, and five MOEAs. Our results indicate that the performances of conventional MOEAs with different population sizes in solving LSMOPs are different. The impact of population sizing is most significant for differential evolution based and particle swarm based MOEAs.

Publication
Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization

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