Plateau Connection Structure and multiobjective metaheuristic performance

This paper proposes the plateau structure imposed by the Pareto dominance relation as a useful determinant of multiobjective metaheuristic performance. In essence, the dominance relation partitions the search space into a set of equivalence classes, and the probabilities, given a specified neighborhood structure, of moving from one class to another are estimated empirically and used to help assess the likely performance of different flavors of multiobjective search algorithms. The utility of this approach is demonstrated on a number of benchmark multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems. In addition, a number of techniques are proposed to allow this method to be used with larger, real-world problems.