Adapting Reference Vectors and Scalarizing Functions by Growing Neural Gas to Handle Irregular Pareto Fronts

The performance of decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) often deteriorates clearly when solving multiobjective optimization problems with irregular Pareto fronts (PFs). The main reason is the improper settings of reference vectors and scalarizing functions. In this paper, we propose a decomposition-based MOEA guided by a growing neural gas network, which learns the topological structure of the PF. Both reference vectors and scalarizing functions are adapted based on the topological structure to enhance the evolutionary algorithm’s search ability. The proposed algorithm is compared with eight state-of-the-art optimizers on 34 test problems. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive in handling irregular PFs.