A unified model for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms with elitism

Though it has been claimed that elitism could improve evolutionary multi-objective search significantly, a thorough and extensive evaluation of its effects is still missing. Guidelines on how elitism could successfully be incorporated have not yet been developed. This paper presents a unified model of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, in which arbitrary variation and selection operators can be combined as building blocks, including archiving and re-insertion strategies. The presented model enables most specific multi-objective (evolutionary) algorithm to be formulated as an instance of it, which will be demonstrated by simple examples. We further show how elitism can be quantified by the model´s parameters and how this allows an easy evaluation of the effect of elitism on different algorithms