On the importance of isolated infeasible solutions in the many-objective constrained NSGA-III

Recently, decomposition has gained a wide interest in solving multi-objective optimization problems involving more than three objectives also known as Many-objective Optimization Problems (MaOPs). In the last few years, there have been many proposals to use decomposition to solve unconstrained problems. However, fewer is the amount of works that has been devoted to propose new decomposition-based algorithms to solve constrained many-objective problems. In this paper, we propose the ISC-Pareto dominance (Isolated Solution-based Constrained Pareto dominance) relation that has the ability to: (1) handle constrained many-objective problems characterized by different types of difficulties and (2) favor the selection of not only infeasible solutions associated to isolated sub-regions but also infeasible solutions with smaller CV (Constraint Violation) values. Our constraint handling strategy has been integrated into the framework of the Constrained Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-III (C-NSGA-III) to produce a new algorithm called Isolated Solution-based Constrained NSGA-III (ISC-NSGA-III). The empirical results have demonstrated that our constraint handling strategy is able to provide better and competitive results when compared against three recently proposed constrained decomposition-based many-objective evolutionary algorithms in addition to a penalty-based version of NSGA-III on the CDTLZ benchmark problems involving up to fifteen objectives. Moreover, the efficacy of ISC-NSGA-III on a real world water management problem is showcased.