The Combative Accretion Model - Multiobjective Optimisation Without Explicit Pareto Ranking

Adam Berry, Peter Vamplew

Abstract: Contemporary evolutionary multiobjective optimisation techniques are becoming increasingly focussed on the notions of archiving, explicit diversity maintenance and population-based Pareto ranking to achieve good approximations of the Pareto front. While it is certainly true that these techniques have been effective, they come at a significant complexity cost that ultimately limits their application to complex problems. This paper proposes a new model that moves away from explicit population-wide Pareto ranking, abandons both complex archiving and diversity measures and incorporates a continuous accretion-based approach that is divergent from the discretely generational nature of traditional evolutionary algorithms. Results indicate that the new approach, the Combative Accretion Model (CAM), achieves markedly better approximations than NSGA across a range of well-recognised test functions. Moreover, CAM is more efficient than NSGAII with respect to the number of comparisons (by an order of magnitude), while achieving comparable, and generally preferable, fronts.