An adaptive parental guidance strategy and its derived indicator-based evolutionary algorithm for multi- and many-objective optimization

The indicator-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms have demonstrated their superiority in handling diverse types of multi-and many-objective optimization problems. However, these evolutionary algorithms still face significant challenges in balancing convergence and diversity of the evolutionary population, despite numerous auxiliary mechanisms designed to improve their performance. To address this issue, an adaptive parental guidance strategy (APGS) is proposed in this paper. On the one hand, APGS leverages the current population to evaluate the quality of the newly generated offspring. On the other hand, it employs an adaptive threshold to select offspring individuals with better convergence and diversity. This approach enhances the convergence and diversity of the candidate solution set throughout the evolutionary process, thereby ensuring high-quality obtained solutions. By incorporating the APGS, this paper proposes a new indicator -based evolutionary algorithm with parental guidance (IEAPG). Simulation results on several test suites and real-world problem show that compared to PREA, SPEA/R, GrEA, TS-NSGA-II, HEA and MaOEA/IGD, the proposed IEAPG has better performance and robustness in dealing with different types of multi-and many -objective optimization problems. Furthermore, further investigation reveals that the incorporation of the APGS can significantly improve the performance of different categories of multi-and many-objective evolutionary algorithms.