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Two cooperative constraint handling techniques with an external archive for constrained multi-objective optimization

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Abstract

Constrained multi-objective problems are difficult for researchers to solve because they contain infeasible regions. To address this issue, this paper proposes two cooperative constraint handling techniques that use an external archive. First, two constraint handling techniques, i.e., the penalty function and the constrained dominance principle, are embedded in multi-objective optimization algorithms and work cooperatively on two populations to increase population diversity. Then, an external archive is designed to preserve high-quality solutions that strike a good balance between objectives, values, and constraints throughout the evolution process. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, and seven state-of-the-art constrained multi-objective optimization algorithms are used to compare three test suites and ten real-world problems. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve competitive performance in solving various constrained multi-objective problems. Additionally, the results show that cooperative constraint handling techniques are more robust than single constraint handling methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Science Foundation for Youths of Gansu Province (22JR5RA311), and the National Key Research and Development Plan under grant number 2020YFB1713600. It was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 62063021, and Project of Gansu Natural Science Foundation (21JR7RA204), respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Technology, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou, 730050, China

    Jianlin Zhang, Jie Cao, Fuqing Zhao & Zuohan Chen

  2. Gansu Engineering Research Center of Manufacturing Information, Lanzhou, 730050, China

    Jianlin Zhang, Jie Cao, Fuqing Zhao & Zuohan Chen

Authors
  1. Jianlin Zhang
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  2. Jie Cao
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  3. Fuqing Zhao
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  4. Zuohan Chen
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Contributions

JZ: conceptualization, methodology, data curation, writing–original draft. JC: project administration, funding acquisition, supervision. FZ: funding acquisition, writing–review & editing. supervision. ZC: visualization, software, validation, writing–review & editing.

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Correspondence to Jianlin Zhang.

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Zhang, J., Cao, J., Zhao, F. et al. Two cooperative constraint handling techniques with an external archive for constrained multi-objective optimization. Memetic Comp. 16, 115–137 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-024-00409-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-024-00409-3

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