Augmented Lagrangian, penalty techniques and surrogate modeling for constrained optimization with CMA-ES

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate a non-elitist Evolution Strategy designed to handle black-box constraints by an adaptive Augmented Lagrangian penalty approach, AL-(µ/µw, λ)-CMA-ES, on problems with up to 28 constraints. Based on stability and performance observations, we propose an improved default parameter setting. We exhibit failure cases of the Augmented Lagrangian technique and show how surrogate modeling of the constraints can overcome some difficulties. Several variants of AL-CMA-ES are compared on a set of nonlinear constrained problems from the literature. Simple adaptive penalty techniques serve as a baseline for comparison