Surrogate Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Transfer Learning for Dynamic Expensive Multi-Objective Optimisation Problems

Dynamic multi-objective optimisation has attracted increasing attention in the evolutionary multi-objective optimisation community in recent years. Comparing to its static counterpart, which has been studied for more than half a century, the involvement of dynamic and uncertain features, including but not limited to the changing Pareto-optimal set, Pareto-optimal front and problem formulation, pose significant more challenges to evolutionary algorithms. This will become even more complicated when the underlying problem involves computationally expensive objective functions which are not rare in many real world application scenarios. In this paper, we pave an initial step towards the study of dynamic multi-objective optimisation with computationally expensive objective functions. More specifically, we use a surrogate assisted evolutionary algorithm, MOEA/D-EGO in particular, as the baseline in order to carry out evolutionary optimisation with a limited amount of function evaluations. Furthermore, instead of restart the MOEMD-EGO from scratch after each change, we use transfer learning to map the previously archived training data to the current landscape in order to jump start the surrogate model building process. By doing so, we can expect a better adaptation to the new environment. Proof-of-concept experiments fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.