A Population-Based Multicriteria Algorithm for Alternative Generation

Abstract

Complex problems are frequently overwhelmed by inconsistent performance requirements and incompatible specifications that can be difficult to identify at the time of problem formulation. Consequently, it is often beneficial to construct a set of different options that provide distinct approaches to the problem. These alternatives need to be close-to-optimal with respect to the specified objective(s), but be maximally different from each other in the solution domain. The approach for creating maximally different solution sets is referred to as modelling-to-generate-alternatives (MGA). This paper introduces a computationally efficient, population-based multicriteria MGA algorithm for generating sets of maximally different alternatives.