A Multipopulation Coevolutionary Strategy for Multiobjective Immune Algorithm

Abstract EN

How to maintain the population diversity is an important issue in designing a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm.

This paper presents an enhanced nondominated neighbor-based immune algorithm in which a multipopulation coevolutionary strategy is introduced for improving the population diversity.

In the proposed algorithm, subpopulations evolve independently; thus the unique characteristics of each subpopulation can be effectively maintained, and the diversity of the entire population is effectively increased.

Besides, the dynamic information of multiple subpopulations is obtained with the help of the designed cooperation operator which reflects a mutually beneficial relationship among subpopulations.

Subpopulations gain the opportunity to exchange information, thereby expanding the search range of the entire population.

Subpopulations make use of the reference experience from each other, thereby improving the efficiency of evolutionary search.

Compared with several state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on well-known and frequently used multiobjective and many-objective problems, the proposed algorithm achieves comparable results in terms of convergence, diversity metrics, and running time on most test problems.