A gene-level hybrid search framework for multiobjective evolutionary optimization

This paper proposes a general framework of gene-level hybrid search (GLHS) for multiobjective evolutionary optimization. Regarding the existing hybrid search methods, most of them usually combine different search strategies and only select one search strategy to generate child solution. This kind of hybrid search is called as a chromosome-level approach in this paper. However, in GLHS, every gene bit of the child solution can be produced using different search strategies and such operation provides the enhanced exploration capability. As an example, two different DE mutation strategies are used in this paper as the variance candidate pool to implement the proposed GLHS framework, named GLHS-DE. To validate the effectiveness of GLHS-DE, it is embedded into one state-of-the-art algorithmic framework of MOEA/D, and is compared to a basic DE operator and two competitive hybrid search operators, i.e., FRRMAB and CDE, on 80 test problems with two to fifteen objectives. The experimental results show GLHS-DE obtains a superior performance over DE, FRRMAB and CDE on about 70 out of 80 test problems, indicating the promising application of our approach for multiobjective evolutionary optimization.