The asynchronous island model and NSGA-II

Abstract

This work presents an implementation of the asynchronous island model suitable for multi-objective evolutionary optimization on heterogeneous and large-scale computing platforms. The migration of individuals is regulated by the crowding comparison operator applied to the originating population during selection and to the receiving population augmented by all migrants during replacement. Experiments using this method combined with NSGA-II show its scalability up to 128 islands and its robustness. Furthermore, the proposed parallelization technique consistently outperforms a multi-start and a random migration approach in terms of convergence speed, while maintaining a comparable population diversity. Applied to a real-world problem of interplanetary trajectory design, we find solutions dominating an actual NASA/ESA mission proposal for a tour from Earth to Jupiter, in a fraction of the computational time that would be needed on a single CPU.