Two-Archive Evolutionary Algorithm for Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization

When solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems, an important issue is how to balance convergence, diversity and feasibility simultaneously. To address this issue, this paper proposes a parameter-free constraint handling technique, a two-archive evolutionary algorithm, for constrained multi-objective optimization. It maintains two co-evolving archives simultaneously: one, denoted as the convergence archive, is the driving force to push the population toward the Pareto front; the other one, denoted as the diversity archive, mainly tends to maintain the population diversity. In particular, to complement the behavior of the convergence archive and provide as much diversified information as possible, the diversity archive aims at exploring areas under-exploited by the convergence archive including the infeasible regions. To leverage the complementary effects of both archives, we develop a restricted mating selection mechanism that adaptively chooses appropriate mating parents from them according to their evolution status. Comprehensive experiments on a series of benchmark problems and a real-world case study fully demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed algorithm, in comparison to five state-of-the-art constrained evolutionary multi-objective optimizers.