A new angle-based preference selection mechanism for solving many-objective optimization problems

Many evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) methodologies have been proposed and performed very well on finding a representative set of Pareto-optimal solutions, but this advantage will be weakened with the increasing number of objectives. And in real applications, what decision makers (DMs) want is a unique solution or a set of solutions rather than the overall Pareto-optimal front. It is a difficult task to solve many-objective problems by using preference information provided by decision maker (DM) during optimization process. In this paper, a new angle-based preference selection mechanism is proposed, which replaces the traditional crowding distance with the aid of preference information provided by the DMs. Particularly, we combine it with a multi-objective immune algorithm with non-dominated neighbor-based selection. The proposed method has been extensively compared with other recently proposed preference-based EMO approaches over DTLZ1, DTLZ2, and DTLZ3 test problems with 4–100 objectives. The results of the experiment indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve competitive and better results.