An Angle-based Many-Objective evolutionary algorithm with Shift-based density estimation and sum of objectives

•The proposed algorithm is effective for solving many-objective problems.•Shift-based estimation and sum of objectives can reserve the excellent solutions.•An angle-based selection strategy can improve the diversity of solutions.•Experimental results have been presented by using Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test. Due to the curse of dimensionality, the existing evolutionary algorithms have difficulties in balancing convergence and diversity in many-objective problems. To address this shortcoming, this paper proposes an efficient many-objective optimizer named MaOEA-ASS. In the MaOEA-ASS, the angle-based selection strategy is used to obtain solutions with good diversity from the population. In addition, the combination of the shift-based density estimation and the sum of objectives, which uses the iteration information and emphasis the distribution of solutions, is employed to obtain the high-quality solutions approximating the optimal Pareto solutions. The proposed MaOEA-ASS is compared with eight state-of-the-art many-objective optimization algorithms (MaOEAs) on the DTLZ and WFG test suites, and its performance is verified on a practical many-objective problem. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MaOEA-ASS has a superior performance over the peer competitors on all considered many-objective problems.