A novel scalable framework for constructing dynamic multi-objective optimization problems

Modeling dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs) has been one of the most challenging tasks in the field of dynamic evolutionary optimization. Based on the analysis of the existing DMOPs, several features widely existed in real-world applications are not taken into account: different objectives may have different function models and variables to be optimized; and the number of conflicting variables should be independent from the number of objectives; the time-linkage property is not considered. In order to overcome the above issues, a novel framework for constructing DMOPs is proposed, where all objectives can be designed independently, and the number of the conflicting variables can be tuned by users. Moreover, it is easy to add new dynamic features to this framework. Several classical dynamic multi-objective optimization algorithms are tested on four scenarios, results show that these characteristics are challenging for the existing algorithms.