A Territory Defining Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms and Preference Incorporation

We have developed a steady-state elitist evolutionary algorithm to approximate the Pareto-optimal frontiers of multiobjective decision making problems. The algorithms define a territory around each individual to prevent crowding in any region. This maintains diversity while facilitating the fast execution of the algorithm. We conducted extensive experiments on a variety of test problems and demonstrated that our algorithm performs well against the leading multiobjective evolutionary algorithms. We also developed a mechanism to incorporate preference information in order to focus on the regions that are appealing to the decision maker. Our experiments show that the algorithm approximates the Pareto-optimal solutions in the desired region very well when we incorporate the preference information. © 2010 IEEE.