The Pareto Envelope-Based Selection Algorithm for Multiobjective Optimization

We introduce a new multiobjective evolutionary algorithm called PESA (the Pareto Envelope-based Selection Algorithm), in which selection and diversity maintenance are controlled via a simple hyper-grid based scheme. PESA’s selection method is relatively unusual in comparison with current well known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, which tend to use counts based on the degree to which solutions dominate others in the population. The diversity maintenance method is similar to that used by certain other methods. The main attraction of PESA is the integration of selection and diversity maintenance, whereby essentially the same technique is used for both tasks. The resulting algorithm is simple to describe, with full pseudocode provided here and real code available from the authors. We compare PESA with two recent strong-performing MOEAs on some multiobjective test problems recently proposed by Deb. We find that PESA emerges as the best method overall on these problems.