This paper provides a survey of the research in and an annotated bibliography of multiple objective combinatorial optimization, MOCO. We present a general formulation of MOCO problems, describe the main characteristics of MOCO problems, and review the main properties and theoretical results for these problems. The main parts of the paper are a section on the review of the available solution methodology, both exact and heuristic, and a section on the annotation of the existing literature in the field organized problem by problem. We conclude the paper by stating open questions and areas of future research.

A survey and annotated bibliography of multiobjective combinatorial optimization

The success of modern heuristics (Simulated Annealing (S.A.), Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithms, …) in solving classical combinatorial optimization problems has drawn the attention of the research community in multicriteria methods.



In fact, for large-scale problems, the simultaneous difficulties of -hard complexity and of multiobjective framework make most Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO) problems intractable for exact methods.



This paper develops the so-called MOSA (Multiobjective Simulated Annealing) method to approximate the set of efficient solutions of a MOCO problem. Different options for the implementation are illustrated and extensive experiments prove the efficiency of the approach. Its results are compared to exact methods on bi-objective knapsack problems. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

MOSA method: a tool for solving multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems

Multiobjective Optimization (MO) has many applications in such fields as the Internet, finance, biomedicine, management science, game theory and engineering. However, solving MO problems is not an easy task. Searching for all Pareto optimal solutions is expensive and a time consuming process because there are usually exponentially large (or infinite) Pareto optimal solutions. Even for simple problems determining whether a point belongs to the Pareto set is \(\mathcal{NP}\) -hard. In this paper, we discuss recent developments in MO. These include optimality conditions, applications, global optimization techniques, the new concept of epsilon Pareto optimal solution, and heuristics.

A survey of recent developments in multiobjective optimization

A bi-objective model for robust resource-constrained project scheduling

In this paper we consider solution methods for multiobjective integer programming (MOIP) problems based on scalarization. We define the MOIP, discuss some common scalarizations, and provide a general formulation that encompasses most scalarizations that have been applied in the MOIP context as special cases. We show that these methods suffer some drawbacks by either only being able to find supported efficient solutions or introducing constraints that can make the computational effort to solve the scalarization prohibitive. We show that Lagrangian duality applied to the general scalarization does not remedy the situation. We also introduce a new scalarization technique, the method of elastic constraints, which is shown to be able to find all efficient solutions and overcome the computational burden of the scalarizations that use constraints on objective values. Finally, we present some results from an application in airline crew scheduling as evidence.

A discussion of scalarization techniques for multiple objective integer programming

The classical 0–1 knapsack problem is considered with two objectives. Two methods of the “two–phases” type are developed to generate the set of efficient solutions. In the first phase, the set of supported efficient solutions is determined by optimizing a parameterized single-objective knapsack problem. Two versions are proposed for a second phase, determining the non-supported efficient solutions: both versions are Branch and Bound approaches, but one is “breadth first”, while the other is “depth first”. Extensive numerical experiments have been realized to compare the results of both methods.

M. Visée

Papers

Two-phases Method and Branch and Bound Procedures to Solve the Bi–objective Knapsack Problem