Towards estimating nadir objective vector using evolutionary approaches

Abstract

Nadir point plays an important role in multi-objective optimization because of its importance in estimating the range of objective values corresponding to desired Pareto-optimal solutions and also in using many classical interactive optimization techniques. Since this point corresponds to the worst Pareto-optimal solution of each objective, the task of estimating the nadir point necessitates information about the whole Pareto optimal frontier and is reported to be a difficult task using classical means. In this paper, for the first time, we have proposed a couple of modifications to an existing evolutionary multi-objective optimization procedure to focus its search towards the extreme objective values front-wise. On up to 20-objective optimization problems, both proposed procedures are found to be capable of finding a near nadir point quickly and reliably. Simulation results are interesting and should encourage further studies and applications in estimating the nadir point, a process which should lead to a better interactive procedure of finding and arriving at a desired Pareto-optimal solution.