A multi-objective genetic algorithm using intermediate features of simulations

Abstract

This paper proposes using intermediate features of traffic simulations in a genetic algorithm designed to find the best scenarios in regulating traffic with multiple objectives. A challenge in genetic algorithms for multi-objective optimization is how to find various optimal scenarios within a limited decision time. Typical evolutionary algorithms usually maintain a population of diversified scenarios whose diversity is measured only by the final objectives available at the end of their simulations. We propose measuring the diversity by also the time series of the objectives during the simulations. The intuition is that simulation scenarios with similar final objective values may contain different series of discrete events that, when combined, can result in better scenarios. We provide empirical evidence by experimenting with agent-based traffic simulations showing the superiority of the proposed genetic algorithm over standard approaches in approximating Pareto fronts.