Automatic Design of Evolutionary Algorithms for Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have been the subject of a large research effort over the past two decades. Traditionally, these MOEAs have been seen as monolithic units, and their study was focused on comparing them as blackboxes. More recently, a component-wise view of MOEAs has emerged, with flexible frameworks combining algorithmic components from different MOEAs. The number of available algorithmic components is large, though, and an algorithm designer working on a specific application cannot analyze all possible combinations. In this paper, we investigate the automatic design of MOEAs, extending previous work on other multi-objective metaheuristics. We conduct our tests on four variants of the permutation flowshop problem that differ on the number and nature of the objectives they consider. Moreover, given the different characteristics of the variants, we also investigate the performance of an automatic MOEA designed for the multi-objective PFSP in general. Our results show that the automatically designed MOEAs are able to outperform six traditional MOEAs, confirming the importance and efficiency of this design methodology.