Helper-Objectives: Using Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms for Single-Objective Optimisation

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of multi-objective methods to guide the search when solving single-objective optimisation problems with genetic algorithms. Using the job shop scheduling and travelling salesman problems as examples, experiments demonstrate that the use of helper-objectives (additional objectives guiding the search) significantly improves the average performance of a standard GA. The helper-objectives guide the search towards solutions containing good building blocks and help the algorithm escape local optima. The experiments reveal that the approach works if the number of simultaneously used helper-objectives is low. However, a high number of helper-objectives can be used in the same run by changing the helper-objectives dynamically. The experiments reveal that for the majority of problem instances studied, the proposed approach significantly outperforms a traditional GA.

The experiments also demonstrate that controlling the proportion of non-dominated solutions in the population is very important when using helper-objectives, since the presence of too many non-dominated solutions removes the selection pressure in the algorithm.