6533b829fe1ef96bd128a36b

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Reference point based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for group decisions

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While in the past decades research on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA) has aimed at finding the whole set of Pareto optimal solutions, current approaches focus on only those parts of the Pareto front which satisfy the preferences of the decision maker (DM). Therefore, they integrate the DM early on in the optimization process instead of leaving him/her alone with the final choice of one solution among the whole Pareto optimal set. In this paper, we address an aspect which has been neglected so far in the research on integrating preferences: in most real-world problems, there is not only one DM, but a group of DMs trying to find one consensus decision all participants are willed to agree to. Therefore, our aim is to introduce methods which focus on the part of the Pareto front which satisfies the preferences of several DMs concurrently. We assume that the DMs have some vague notion of their preferences a priori the search in form of a reference point or goal. Thus, we present and compare several reference point based approaches for group decisions and evaluate them on three ZDT and two flow shop problems.