A novel constraint-handling technique based on dynamic weights for constrained optimization problems

• Published in: Soft computing (Berlin, Germany) Vol. 22; no. 12; pp. 3919 - 3935
• Main Authors: Peng, Chaoda, Liu, Hai-Lin, Gu, Fangqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.06.2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Computational Intelligence; Constraints; Control; Convergence; Engineering; Evolutionary algorithms; Handling; Mathematical Logic and Foundations; Mechatronics; Methodologies and Application; Methods; Optimization; Optimization techniques; Performance evaluation; Robotics; Violations; Constraint-handling technique; Evolutionary algorithm; Tchebycheff approach; Constrained optimization
• ISSN: 1432-7643; 1433-7479
• DOI: 10.1007/s00500-017-2603-x

Bi-objective constraint-handling technique may be one of the most promising constraint techniques for constrained optimization problems. It regards the constraints as an extra objective and using Pareto ranking as selection operator. These algorithms achieve a good convergence by utilizing potential infeasible individuals, but not be good at maintaining the diversity of the population. It is significant to balance the diversity of the population and the convergence of the algorithm. This paper proposes a novel constraint-handling technique based on biased dynamic weights for constrained evolutionary algorithm. The biased weights are used to select different individuals with low objective values and low degree of constraint violations. Furthermore, along with the evolution, more emphasis is placed on the individuals with lower objective values and lower degree of constraint violations by adjusting the biased weights dynamically, which forces the search to a promising feasible region. Thus, the proposed algorithm can keep a good balance between the convergence and the diversity of the population. Moreover, we compared the proposed algorithm with other state-of-the-art algorithms on 42 benchmark problems. The experimental results showed the reliability and stabilization of the proposed algorithm.