Analysis of a Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm on the 0–1 knapsack problem

Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are increasingly being used for effectively solving many real-world problems, and many empirical results are available. However, theoretical analysis is limited to a few simple toy functions. In this work, we select the well-known knapsack problem for the analysis. The multiobjective knapsack problem in its general form is NP-complete. Moreover, the size of the set of Pareto-optimal solutions can grow exponentially with the number of items in the knapsack. Thus, we formalize a (1+ε)-approximate set of the knapsack problem and attempt to present a rigorous running time analysis of a MOEA to obtain the formalized set. The algorithm used in the paper is based on a restricted mating pool with a separate archive to store the remaining population; we call the algorithm a Restricted Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimizer (REMO). We also analyze the running time of REMO on a special bi-objective linear function, known as LOTZ (Leading Ones : Trailing Zeros), whose Pareto set is shown to be a subset of the knapsack. An extension of the analysis to the Simple Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimizer (SEMO) is also presented. A strategy based on partitioning of the decision space into fitness layers is used for the analysis.