Formulation and application of weight-function-based physical programming

Physical programming is effective in multi-objective optimization since it assists the designer to find the most preferred solution. Preference-function-based physical programming (PFPP) abandons the weighted-sum approach and its performance in generating Pareto solutions is susceptible to the transformation of pseudo-preferences. With the aim of integrating a weighted-sum approach into physical programming and generating well-distributed Pareto solutions, a weight-function-based physical programming (WFPP) method has been proposed. The approach forms a weight function for each normalized criterion and uses the variable weighted sum of all criteria as the aggregate objective function. Implementation for numerical and engineering design problems indicates that WFPP works as well as PFPP. The design process of generating Pareto solutions by WFPP is further presented, where the pseudo-preferences are allowed to transform in different ranges. Examples and results demonstrate that solutions generated by WFPP have better diversity performance than those of PFPP, especially when the pseudo-preferences are far from the true Pareto front.