Reference direction based immune clone algorithm for many-objective optimization

In this paper, a new preference multi-objective optimization algorithm called immune clone algorithm based on reference direction method (RD-ICA) is proposed for solving many-objective optimization problems. First, an intelligent recombination operator, which performs well on the functions comprising many parameters, is introduced into an immune clone algorithm so as to explore the potentially excellent gene segments of all individuals in the antibody population. Second, a reference direction method, a very strict ranking based on the desire of decision makers (DMs), is used to guide selection and clone of the active population. Then a light beam search (LBS) is borrowed to pick out a small set of individuals filling the external population. The proposed method has been extensively compared with other recently proposed evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) approaches over DTLZ problems with from 4 to 100 objectives. Experimental results indicate RD-ICA can achieve competitive results.