Solving dynamic multi-objective optimization problem of immersed tunnel elements via multi-source evolutionary information clustering method

Dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs) are time- and space-varying, thus maintaining/improving the uncertainty degree of evolutionary information (i.e., information entropy) in the population and providing useful knowledge are two important tasks to make dynamic multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (DMOEAs) adapt to changing environments. To achieve the above objectives, a multi-source population clustering (MPC) method is proposed to assist DMOEAs in improving their tracking performance during the full-cycle optimization in the current study. In the MPC, three different information sources are used to provide diverse spatiotemporal evolutionary information, aiding DMOEAs in adapting to various changing environments. Subsequently, an enhanced spectral clustering approach is employed to group all evolutionary individuals from different information sources into many clusters/subspaces. Finally, the selected DMOEA is employed to search all subspaces in parallel via the high-performing computing method. The MPC is incorporated into a regularity model-based multi-objective estimation of distribution algorithm (called as MPC-RM-MEDA) and is compared with six famous DMOEAs on 14 10- and 30-dimensional DMOPs, which are proposed in IEEE Congress on Evolutionary computation 2018. Experimental results demonstrate that the overall tracking performance of the proposed MPC-RM-MEDA is significantly superior to that of other selected competitors in various dynamic environments. Additionally, the MPC-RM-MEDA is utilized to address a real-world DMOP involving an immersed tunnel element. The obtained results and comparison with the knee point-based transfer learning method verify that the MPC is an efficient and dependable approach for enhancing the tracking performance of other DMOEAs in solving actual DMOPs.