An Ontology of Preference-Based Multiobjective Metaheuristics

Abstract

User preference integration is of great importance in multi-objective optimization, in particular in many objective optimization. Preferences have long been considered in traditional multicriteria decision making (MCDM) which is based on mathematical programming. Recently, it is integrated in multi-objective metaheuristics (MOMH), resulting in focus on preferred parts of the Pareto front instead of the whole Pareto front. The number of publications on preference-based multiobjective metaheuristics has increased rapidly over the past decades. There already exist various preference handling methods and MOMH methods, which have been combined in diverse ways. This article proposes to use the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to model and systematize the results developed in this field. A review of the existing work is provided, based on which an ontology is built and instantiated with state-of-the-art results. The OWL ontology is made public and open to future extension. Moreover, the usage of the ontology is exemplified for different usecases, including querying for methods that match an engineering application, bibliometric analysis, checking existence of combinations of preference models and MOMH techniques, and discovering opportunities for new research and open research questions.

Budgeted Multi-Objective Optimization with a Focus on the Central Part of the Pareto Front -- Extended Version

“…Targeting special parts of the objective space has been largely discussed within the multi-objective optimization literature, see for example [6] or [50] for a review. The benefits of targeting a part of the Pareto front instead of trying to unveil it entirely go beyond reflecting the user's preferences: as will be shown by the experiments of Section 7, it allows an enhanced distribution of the proposed solutions within this area.…”

Building and Using an Ontology of Preference-Based Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms

“…Moreover, the classes and properties can also be extended and improved by means of WebProt´eg´e, which offers a shared Ontology edit platform for collaborative editing. Further use cases of the PMOEA Ontology, including visualization tool, finding appropriate method for an application, discovering opportunities for new research, can be found in [32].…”