A Specialized Evolutionary Approach to the bi-objective Travelling Thief Problem

Abstract

In the recent years, it has been shown that real world-problems are often comprised of two, interdependent subproblems. Often, solving them independently does not lead to the solution to the entire problem. In this article, a Travelling Thief Problem is considered, which combines a Travelling Salesman Problem with a Knapsack Problem. A Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) is investigated, along with its recent modification - a Non-Dominated Tournament Genetic Algorithm (NTGA). Each method is investigated in two configurations. One, with generic representation, and genetic operators. The other, specialized to the given problem, to show how the specialization of genetic operators leads to better results. The impact of the modifications introduced by NTGA is verified. A set of Quality Measures is used to verify the convergence, and diversity of the resulting PF approximations, and efficiency of the method. A set of experiments is carried out. It is shown that both methods work almost the same when generic representation is used. However, NTGA outperforms classical NSGA-II in the specialized results.