A Similarity-based Mating Scheme for Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization

Abstract. This paper proposes a new mating scheme for evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO), which simultaneously improves the convergence speed to the Pareto-front and the diversity of solutions. The proposed mating scheme is a two-stage selection mechanism. In the first stage, standard fitness-based selection is iterated for selecting a pre-specified number of candidate solutions from the current population. In the second stage, similarity-based tournament selection is used for choosing a pair of parents among the candidate solutions selected in the first stage. For maintaining the diversity of solutions, selection probabilities of parents are biased toward extreme solutions that are different from prototypical (i.e., average) solutions. At the same time, our mating scheme uses a mechanism where similar parents are more likely to be chosen for improving the convergence speed to the Paretofront. Through computational experiments on multi-objective knapsack problems, it is shown that the performance of recently proposed well-known EMO algorithms (SPEA and NSGA-II) can be improved by our mating scheme.