Simulation based Hardness Evaluation of a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simulation framework to evaluate the computational hardness of multi-objective genetic algorithms by analyzing their convergence behavior in a game-based scenario with varying objectives.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation-based method for assessing the difficulty of multi-objective genetic algorithms through a game-inspired framework and experimental analysis.

Findings

Hardness increases with the number of objectives.

Ranking influences the convergence behavior.

Allowing dominated solutions affects evolution dynamics.

Abstract

Studies have shown that multi-objective optimization problems are hard problems. Such problems either require longer time to converge to an optimum solution, or may not converge at all. Recently some researchers have claimed that real culprit for increasing the hardness of multi-objective problems are not the number of objectives themselves rather it is the increased size of solution set, incompatibility of solutions, and high probability of finding suboptimal solution due to increased number of local maxima. In this work, we have setup a simple framework for the evaluation of hardness of multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOGA). The algorithm is designed for a pray-predator game where a player is to improve its lifespan, challenging level and usability of the game arena through number of generations. A rigorous set of experiments are performed for quantifying the hardness in terms of evolution for increasing number of objective functions. In genetic algorithm, crossover and mutation with equal probability are applied to create offspring in each generation. First, each objective function is maximized individually by ranking the competing players on the basis of the fitness (cost) function, and then a multi-objective cost function (sum of individual cost functions) is maximized with ranking, and also without ranking where dominated solutions are also allowed to evolve.