Seeking and leveraging alternative variable dependency concepts in gray-box-elusive bimodal land-use allocation problems

authored by

J. Maciążek, M. W. Przewozniczek, J. Schwaab

Abstract

Solving land-use allocation problems can help us to deal with some of the most urgent global environmental issues. Since these problems are NP-hard, effective optimizers are needed to handle them. The knowledge about variable dependencies allows for proposing such tools. However, in this work, we consider a real-world multi-objective problem for which standard variable dependency discovery techniques are inapplicable. Therefore, using linkage-based variation operators is unreachable. To address this issue, we propose a definition of problem-dedicated variable dependency. On this base, we propose obtaining masks of dependent variables. Using them, we construct three novel crossover operators. The results concerning real-world test cases show that introducing our propositions into two well-known optimizers (NSGA-II, MOEA/D) dedicated to multi-objective optimization significantly improves their effectiveness.

External Organisation(s)

ETH Zurich

Type

Preprint

Publication date

2025

Publication status

E-pub ahead of print

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 15 - Life on Land

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2504.11882 (Access: Open)