In this paper, we introduce PASSSS (PAS/sup 4/), the Pareto archived and dominance selection with shrinkable search space evolutionary computation algorithm. The main contribution of this paper is a diversity control mechanism embedded into the selection operator of an evolutionary algorithm that can be used (with little or no modification) to solve both single-objective and multi-objective optimization problems. We present a detailed description of the PAS/sup 4/ algorithm, and illustrate its capabilities by solving several engineering design problems and some test functions from a well-known benchmark in evolutionary optimization. Additionally, PAS/sup 4/ is also used to solve continuous and discrete multiobjective engineering optimization problems.