A unified model for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms with elitism

Marco Laumanns, Eckart Zitzler, Lothar Thiele

Abstract: Though it has been claimed that elitism could improve evolutionary multi-objective search significantly, a thorough and extensive evaluation of its effects is still missing. Guidelines on how elitism could successfully be incorporated have not yet been developed. This paper presents a unified model of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, in which arbitrary variation and selection operators can be combined as building blocks, including archiving and re-insertion strategies. The presented model enables most specific multi-objective (evolutionary) algorithm to be formulated as an instance of it, which will be demonstrated by simple examples. We further show how elitism can be quantified by the model's parameters and how this allows an easy evaluation of the effect of elitism on different algorithms.