Prediction-based population re-initialization for evolutionary dynamic multi-objective optimization

Optimization in changing environment is a challenging task, especially when multiple objectives are to be optimized simultaneously. The basic idea to address dynamic optimization problems is to utilize history information to guide future search. In this paper, two strategies for population re-initialization are introduced when a change in the environment is detected. The first strategy is to predict the new location of individuals from the location changes that have occurred in the history. The current population is then partially or completely replaced by the new individuals generated based on prediction. The second strategy is to perturb the current population with a Gaussian noise whose variance is estimated according to previous changes. The prediction based population re-initialization strategies, together with the random re-initialization method, are then compared on two bi-objective test problems. Conclusions on the different re-initialization strategies are drawn based on the preliminary empirical results.