Searching with direction awareness: Multi-objective genetic algorithm based on angle quantization and crowding distance MOGA-AQCD

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is widely used for solving various engineering real-life problems. Meta-heuristic optimization has been regarded as an effective solution for such problems because it enables the successful examination of a broad range of candidate solutions and the selection of optimal ones. However, there is a high probability of the algorithms becoming ensnared in local minima due to the complex optimization surface and the unlimited number of viable solutions. Therefore, to provide the decision maker with the optimal non-dominated set of solutions, significant improvements must be made to the search process, where the efficient exploration of the population has a vital role in maintaining a good non-dominated solution in evolutionary algorithms. NSGA-II is regarded as the state of the art for the meta-heuristic MOO. NSGA-II and its variants have adopted the concept of crowding distance as a measure that can leverage the characteristics of the distribution of solutions in the search space and provide a high-level of exploration. However, this method is not sufficient to effectively explore the search space because it ignores the direction of the exploration. In this paper, the angle quantization of solutions is combined with the crowding distance to create the MOGA-AQCD algorithm, which preserves equal exploration in all directions and aims at finding equal distribution of solutions within the search space. This approach is applied to a set of standard benchmark MOO functions. The results show that MOGA-AQCD is superior to NSGA-II and NSGA-III on the most evaluation measures for MOO.