Local Dominance Including Control of Dominance Area of Solutions in MOEAs

Local dominance has been shown to improve significantly the overall performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) on combinatorial optimization problems. This work proposes the control of dominance area of solutions in local dominance MOEAs to enhance Pareto selection aiming to find solutions with high convergence and diversity properties. We control the expansion or contraction of the dominance area of solutions and analyze its effects on the search performance of a local dominance MOEA using 0/1 multiobjective knapsack problems. We show that convergence of the algorithm can be significantly improved while keeping a good distribution of solutions along the whole true Pareto front by using local dominance with expansion of dominance area of solutions. We also show that by controlling the dominance area of solutions dominance can be applied within very small neighborhoods, which reduces significantly the computational cost of the local dominance MOEA