Effects of nongeometric binary crossover on multiobjective 0/1 knapsack problems

Standard binary crossover operators (e.g., one-point, two-point, and uniform) tend to decrease the diversity of solutions while they improve the convergence to the Pareto front. This is because standard binary crossover operators, which are called geometric crossovers, always generate an offspring in the line segment between its parents under the Hamming distance in the genotype space. In our former study, we have already proposed a nongeometric binary crossover operator to generate an offspring outside the line segment between its parents. In this article, we examine the effect of our crossover operator on the performance of evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) algorithms through computational experiments on various multiobjective knapsack problems. Experimental results show that our crossover operator improves the search ability of EMO algorithms for a wide range of test problems. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008