Thesis

2018 - 2021 University of Lille / Inria Contributions to multiobjective optimization based on decomposition

In this thesis, we are interested in multi-objective combinatorial optimization, and in particular in evolutionary algorithms based on decomposition. This type of approaches consists in decomposing the original multi-objective problem into multiple single-objective sub-problems that are then solved cooperatively. In this context, we consider the design and the analysis of new algorithmic components contributing to the establishment of the foundations of an optimization framework based on decomposition for multi-objective combinatorial problems known as “black box”, i.e., for which the analytical form of the objective functions is not available to the solving algorithm. First of all, we investigate the key components for a better distribution of the computational efforts during the optimization process. To this end, we study the joint impact of the population size and of the number of solutions generated at each iteration, while proposing different strategies for selecting one ore multiple sub-problem(s) to be optimized at each stage. We then study different mechanisms allowing to escape from local optima. They are inspired by techniques from single-objective optimization, and we show they can significantly improve the convergence profile of the considered approaches. Finally, we consider the context of expensive optimization, where the evaluation of each solution is particularly intensive in terms of computational resources. This hence drastically restrict the budget allocated to the optimization process. As such, we investigate new components based on combinatorial meta-models, and we consider their integration within decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary approaches.