Constraint-Objective Cooperative Coevolution for Large-scale Constrained Optimization

Large-scale optimization problems and constrained optimization problems have attracted considerable attention in the swarm and evolutionary intelligence communities and exemplify two common features of real problems, i.e., a large scale and constraint limitations. However, only a little work on solving large-scale continuous constrained optimization problems exists. Moreover, the types of benchmarks proposed for large-scale continuous constrained optimization algorithms are not comprehensive at present. In this article, first, a constraint-objective cooperative coevolution (COCC) framework is proposed for large-scale continuous constrained optimization problems, which is based on the dual nature of the objective and constraint functions: modular and imbalanced components. The COCC framework allocates the computing resources to different components according to the impact of objective values and constraint violations. Second, a benchmark for large-scale continuous constrained optimization is presented, which takes into account the modular nature, as well as both imbalanced and overlapping characteristics of components. Finally, three different evolutionary algorithms are embedded into the COCC framework for experiments, and the experimental results show that COCC performs competitively.