A New Visualization Tool in Many-Objective Optimization Problems

During the past decade, development in the field of multi-objective optimization (MOO) and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) has led to the so-called many-objective optimization problems (many-MOO), which involve from half a dozen to a few dozens of simultaneous objectives. Many algorithms have been proposed in order to approach the scalability issues involved when trying to solve many-MOO problems. One of these issues is related to the visualization of solutions and relations between them in high dimensional objective space. In this paper we introduce a new visualization tool in order to better illustrate the behavior and relations between objectives in order to assist understanding of the problem by the decision-maker. The understanding provided by the proposed tool can be used to redesign the optimization problem and possibly reduce the number of objectives or transform some of them into constraints, leading to an iterative and also interactive design and optimize cycle.