A Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimizer Hybridized with Scatter Search

This paper presents a new multi-objective evolutionary algorithm which consists of a hybrid between a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach and scatter search. The main idea of the approach is to combine the high convergence rate of the particle swarm optimization algorithm with a local search approach based on scatter search. We propose a new leader selection scheme for PSO, which aims to accelerate convergence. Upon applying PSO, scatter search acts as a local search scheme, improving the spread of the nondominated solutions found so far. Thus, the hybrid constitutes an efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, which can produce reasonably good approximations of the Pareto fronts of multi-objective problems of high dimensionality, while only performing 4,000 fitness function evaluations. Our proposed approach is validated using ten standard test functions commonly adopted in the specialized literature. Our results are compared with respect to a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that is representative of the state-of-the-art in the area: the NSGA-II.