A many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on learning assessment and mapping guidance of historical superior information

Abstract Multi-objective optimization algorithms have shown effectiveness on problems with two or three objectives. As the number of objectives increases, the proportion of non-dominated solutions increases rapidly, resulting in insufficient selection pressure. Nevertheless, insufficient selection pressure usually leads to the loss of convergence, too intense selection pressure often results in a lack of diversity. Hence, balancing the convergence and diversity remains a challenging problem in many-objective optimization problems. To remedy this issue, a many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on learning assessment and mapping guidance of historical superior information, referred to here as MaOEA-LAMG, is presented. In the proposed algorithm, an effective learning assessment strategy according to historical superior information based on an elite archive updated by indicator I + is proposed, which can estimate the shape of the Pareto front and lay the foundation for subsequent fitness and acute angle-based similarity calculations. From this foundation, to balance the convergence and diversity dynamically, a mapping guidance strategy based on the historical superior information is designed, which contains clustering, associating, and proportional selection. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated and compared with 10 state-of-the-art algorithms on 24 test instances with various Pareto fronts and real-world water resource planning problem. The empirical studies substantiate the efficacy of the results with competitive performance.