Boosting Cooperative Coevolution for Large Scale Optimization with a Fine-Grained Computation Resource Allocation Strategy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel fine-grained computation resource allocation strategy for cooperative coevolution, significantly improving efficiency and performance in large scale optimization problems by adaptively selecting subproblems based on their potential contribution.

Contribution

It develops a mathematical model for resource allocation in CC and proposes a fine-grained strategy that considers subproblem contribution, evolution status, and theoretical optimality, enhancing existing methods.

Findings

FCRA outperforms existing CRA strategies in benchmark tests.

The CC algorithm with FCRA is highly competitive for LSOPs.

Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Cooperative coevolution (CC) has shown great potential in solving large scale optimization problems (LSOPs). However, traditional CC algorithms often waste part of computation resource (CR) as they equally allocate CR among all the subproblems. The recently developed contribution-based CC (CBCC) algorithms improve the traditional ones to a certain extent by adaptively allocating CR according to some heuristic rules. Different from existing works, this study explicitly constructs a mathematical model for the CR allocation (CRA) problem in CC and proposes a novel fine-grained CRA (FCRA) strategy by fully considering both the theoretically optimal solution of the CRA model and the evolution characteristics of CC. FCRA takes a single iteration as a basic CRA unit and always selects the subproblem which is most likely to make the largest contribution to the total fitness improvement to undergo a new iteration, where the contribution of a subproblem at a new iteration is estimated according to its current contribution, current evolution status as well as the estimation for its current contribution. We verified the efficiency of FCRA by combining it with SHADE which is an excellent differential evolution variant but has never been employed in the CC framework. Experimental results on two benchmark suites for LSOPs demonstrate that FCRA significantly outperforms existing CRA strategies and the resultant CC algorithm is highly competitive in solving LSOPs.