Diversity Assessment of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms: Performance Metric and Benchmark Problems

Diversity preservation plays an important role in the design of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, but the diversity performance assessment of these algorithms remains challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes a performance metric and a multi-objective test suite for the diversity assessment of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. The proposed metric assesses both the evenness and spread of a solution set by projecting it to a lower-dimensional hypercube and calculating the “volume” of the projected solution set. The proposed test suite contains eight benchmark problems, which pose stiff challenges for existing algorithms to obtain a diverse solution set. Experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed metric can assess the diversity of a solution set more precisely than existing ones, and the proposed test suite can be used to effectively distinguish between algorithms with respect to their diversity performance.