A novel decompostion-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with an application to engineering optimal design problems

Many real-world optimization problems such as engineering design can be eventually modeled as the corresponding multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) which must be solved to obtain approximate Pareto optimal fronts. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has been regarded as a very promising approach for solving MOPs. Recent studies have shown that MOEA/D with uniform weight vectors is well-suited to MOPs with regular Pareto optimal fronts, but its performance in terms of diversity deteriorates on MOPs with irregular Pareto optimal fronts such as highly nonlinear and convex. In this way, the solution set obtained by the algorithm can not provide more reasonable choices for decision makers. In order to efficiently overcome this drawback, in this paper, we propose an improved MOEA/D algorithm by virtue of the well-known Pascoletti-Serafini scalarization method and a new strategy of multi-reference points. Specifically, this strategy consists of the setting and adaptation of reference points generated by the techniques of equidistant partition and projection. For performance assessment, the proposed algorithm is compared with existing four state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on both benchmark test problems with various types of Pareto optimal fronts and two real-world MOPs including the hatch cover design and the rocket injector design in engineering optimization. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm exhibits better diversity performance than that of the other compared algorithms.