Improved Solution to the Non-Domination Level Update Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a space-efficient and a tree-based approach to efficiently update non-dominated fronts after solution insertions or deletions, improving comparison costs over previous methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel space-efficient ENLU variant and a tree-based method for non-domination level updates, with theoretical analysis of comparison complexities.

Findings

Tree-based approach achieves O(log N) comparisons in worst case.

Maximum comparison reduction of K - log K for deletions in certain cases.

New online sorting algorithm with competitive analysis.

Abstract

Non-domination level update problem is to sort the non-dominated fronts after insertion or deletion of a solution. Generally the solution to this problem requires to perform the complete non-dominated sorting which is too expensive in terms of number of comparisons. Recently an Efficient Non-domination Level Update (ENLU) approach is proposed which does not perform the complete sorting. For this purpose, in this paper a space efficient version of ENLU approach is proposed without compromising the number of comparisons. However this approach does not work satisfactorily in all the cases. So we have also proposed another tree based approach for solving this non-domination level update problem. In case of insertion, the tree based approach always checks for same number of fronts unlike linear approach in which the number of fronts to be checked depends on the inserted solution. The result shows that in case where all the solutions are dominating in nature the maximum number of comparisons using tree based approach is $\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ as opposed to $\mathcal{O}(N)$ in ENLU approach. When all the solutions are equally divided into $K$ fronts such that each solution in a front is dominated by all the solutions in the previous front then the maximum number of comparisons to find a deleted solution in case of tree based approach is $K{-}\log K$ less than that of ENLU approach. Using these approaches an on-line sorting algorithm is also proposed and the competitive analysis of this algorithm is also presented.