An Efficient Chemical Reaction Optimization Algorithm for Multiobjective Optimization

Recently, a new metaheuristic called chemical reaction optimization was proposed. This search algorithm, inspired by chemical reactions launched during collisions, inherits several features from other metaheuristics such as simulated annealing and particle swarm optimization. This fact has made it, nowadays, one of the most powerful search algorithms in solving mono-objective optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective variant of chemical reaction optimization, called nondominated sorting chemical reaction optimization, in an attempt to exploit chemical reaction optimization features in tackling problems involving multiple conflicting criteria. Since our approach is based on nondominated sorting, one of the main contributions of this paper is the proposal of a new quasi-linear average time complexity quick nondominated sorting algorithm; thereby making our multiobjective algorithm efficient from a computational cost viewpoint. The experimental comparisons against several other multiobjective algorithms on a variety of benchmark problems involving various difficulties show the effectiveness and the efficiency of this multiobjective version in providing a well-converged and well-diversified approximation of the Pareto front.