CMOEA/D-TAP, which incorporates the threshold adaptive penalty (TAP) function into MOEA/D, has shown competitive performance on the CTP and CF benchmark suites. However, its effectiveness diminishes on more challenging CMOPs, such as DASCMOP, LIRCMOP, and MW, where a considerable number of function evaluations are consumed during the early optimization phase due to population stagnation and slow convergence toward the Pareto front. This behavior is primarily attributed to severe constraints, which prevent many solutions from reaching the constrained Pareto front (CPF) within the available evaluation budget. To overcome this limitation, CMOEA/D-TAP is enhanced by incorporating a push and pull search strategy, referred to as PPSTAP. The proposed algorithm operates in two distinct phases: a push phase that drives the population toward the unconstrained Pareto front, followed by a pull phase that guides solutions toward the CPF using an adaptive penalty function method. Extensive experiments on the CF, DASCMOP, LIRCMOP, and MW benchmark suites include sensitivity analysis against PPS and CMOEA/D-TAP and comparison of the best-performing variant, PPSTAP ($ p\, $ = 20), with BiCo, C3M, and CCMO. Performance is evaluated using IGD, HV, and IGDp with statistical validation. The results show that all PPSTAP variants outperform their parent algorithms on average, while PPSTAP ($ p\, $ = 20) achieves the best overall performance across constrained multiobjective optimization problems.
Citation: Muhammad Sagheer, Muhammad Asif Jan, Akhtar Munir Khan, Emel Khan, Farman Shah. Augmenting push and pull search to improve threshold adaptive penalty function–based MOEA/D[J]. AIMS Mathematics, 2026, 11(9): 27585-27632. doi: 10.3934/math.20261104
CMOEA/D-TAP, which incorporates the threshold adaptive penalty (TAP) function into MOEA/D, has shown competitive performance on the CTP and CF benchmark suites. However, its effectiveness diminishes on more challenging CMOPs, such as DASCMOP, LIRCMOP, and MW, where a considerable number of function evaluations are consumed during the early optimization phase due to population stagnation and slow convergence toward the Pareto front. This behavior is primarily attributed to severe constraints, which prevent many solutions from reaching the constrained Pareto front (CPF) within the available evaluation budget. To overcome this limitation, CMOEA/D-TAP is enhanced by incorporating a push and pull search strategy, referred to as PPSTAP. The proposed algorithm operates in two distinct phases: a push phase that drives the population toward the unconstrained Pareto front, followed by a pull phase that guides solutions toward the CPF using an adaptive penalty function method. Extensive experiments on the CF, DASCMOP, LIRCMOP, and MW benchmark suites include sensitivity analysis against PPS and CMOEA/D-TAP and comparison of the best-performing variant, PPSTAP ($ p\, $ = 20), with BiCo, C3M, and CCMO. Performance is evaluated using IGD, HV, and IGDp with statistical validation. The results show that all PPSTAP variants outperform their parent algorithms on average, while PPSTAP ($ p\, $ = 20) achieves the best overall performance across constrained multiobjective optimization problems.
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