orthogonal_distance

Get subset of Pareto front based on distance

Specification

  • Alias: None

  • Arguments: REALLIST

  • Default: 0.01 for all objectives

Description

Note that MOGA and SOGA create additional output files during execution. “finaldata.dat” is a file that holds the final set of Pareto optimal solutions after any post-processing is complete. “discards.dat” holds solutions that were discarded from the population during the course of evolution. It can often be useful to plot objective function values from these files to visually see the Pareto front and ensure that finaldata.dat solutions dominate discards.dat solutions. The solutions are written to these output files in the format “Input1…InputN..Output1…OutputM”. If MOGA is used in a hybrid optimization meta-iteration (which requires one optimal solution from each individual optimization method to be passed to the subsequent optimization method as its starting point), the solution in the Pareto set closest to the “utopia” point is given as the best solution. This solution is also reported in the Dakota output. This “best” solution in the Pareto set has minimum distance from the utopia point. The utopia point is defined as the point of extreme (best) values for each objective function. For example, if the Pareto front is bounded by (1,100) and (90,2), then (1,2) is the utopia point. There will be a point in the Pareto set that has minimum L2-norm distance to this point, for example (10,10) may be such a point. In SOGA, the solution that minimizes the single objective function is returned as the best solution. If moga is used in meta-iteration which may require passing multiple solutions to the next level (such as the surrogate_based_global or hybrid methods), the orthogonal_distance postprocessor type may be used to specify the distances between each solution value to winnow down the solutions in the full Pareto front to a subset which will be passed to the next iteration.