Empirical Study on the Benefits of Multiobjectivization for Solving Single-Objective Problems

Whether it is in the field of production, logistics, in medicine or biology; everywhere the global optimal solution or the set of global optimal solutions is sought. However, most real-world problems are of nonlinear nature and naturally multimodal which poses severe problems to global optimization. Multimodality, the existence of multiple (local) optima, is regarded as one of the biggest challenges for continuous single-objective problems [23]. A lot of algorithms get stuck searching for the global optimum or are requiring many function evaluations to escape local optima. One of the most popular strategies for dealing with multimodal problems are population-based methods like evolutionary algorithms due to their global search abilities [2]. In this paper we will examine another approach of coping with local traps, namely multiobjectivization. By transforming a single-objective into a multi-objective problem, we aim at exploiting the properties of multi-objective landscapes. So far, the characteristics of single-objective optimization problems have often been directly transferred to the multiobjective domain.