Epistemology

Ecology

Programming language

Convergence (economics)

Economic growth

Computer science

Mathematical optimization

Geography

Ideal (ethics)

Mathematics

Biology

Decomposition

Ideal point

Point (geometry)

Geodesy

Evolutionary algorithm

Benchmark (surveying)

Philosophy

Economics

Set (abstract data type)

Geometry

Applied Soft Computing

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has continuously proven effective for multi-objective optimization. So far, the effect of weight vectors and scalarizing methods in MOEA/D has been intensively studied. However, the reference point which serves as the starting point of reference lines (determined by weight vectors) is yet to be well studied. This study aims to fill in this research gap. Ideally, the ideal point of a multi-objective problem could serve as the reference point, however, since the ideal point is often unknown beforehand, the reference point has to be estimated (or specified). In this study, the effect of the reference point specified in three representative manners, i.e., pessimistic, optimistic and dynamic (from optimistic to pessimistic), is examined on three sets of benchmark problems. Each set of the problems has different degrees of difficulty in convergence and spread. Experimental results show that (i) the reference point implicitly impacts the converge...

On the effect of reference point in MOEA/D for multi-objective optimization