A clustering based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

In this paper, we propose a clustering based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (CLUMOEA) to deal with the multiobjective optimization problems with irregular Pareto front shapes. CLUMOEA uses a k-means clustering method to discover the population structure by partitioning the solutions into several clusters, and it only allows the solutions in the same cluster to do the reproduction. To reduce the computational cost and balance the exploration and exploitation, the clustering process and evolutionary process are integrated together and they are performed simultaneously. In addition to the clustering, CLUMOEA also uses a distance tournament selection to choose the more similar mating solutions to accelerate the convergence. Besides, a cosine nondominated selection method considering the location and distance information of the solutions are further presented to construct the final population with good diversity. The experimental results show that, compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms, CLUMOEA has significant advantages on dealing with the given test problems with irregular Pareto front shapes.