A Multi-Objective Evolutionary approach for linear antenna array design and synthesis

The linear antenna array design problem is one of the most important in electromagnetism. While designing a linear antenna array, the goal of the designer is to achieve the “minimum average side lobe level” and a “null control” in specific directions. In contrast to the existing methods that attempt to minimize a weighted sum of these two objectives considered here, in this paper our contribution is twofold. First, we have considered these as two distinct objectives which are optimized simultaneously in a multi-objective framework. Second, for directivity purposes, we have introduced another objective called the “maximum side lobe level” in the design formulation. The resulting multi-objective optimization problem is solved by using the recently-proposed decomposition-based Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimizer (dMOPSO). Our experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is able to obtain results which are better than those obtained by two other state-of-the-art Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). Additionally, the individual minima reached by dMOPSO outperform those achieved by two single-objective evolutionary algorithms.