NAUTILUS framework : towards trade-off-free interaction in multiobjective optimization

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework of different interactive NAUTILUS methods for multiobjective optimization. In interactive methods, the decision maker iteratively sees solution alternatives and provides one’s preferences in order to find the most preferred solution. We question the widely used setting that the solutions shown to the decision maker should all be Pareto optimal which implies that improvement in any objective function necessitates allowing impairment in some others. Instead, in NAUTILUS we enable the decision maker to make a free search without having to trade-off by starting from an inferior solution and iteratively approaching the Pareto optimal set by allowing all objective functions to improve. The framework presented consists of different modules for preference elicitation and optimization. Four main NAUTILUS method variants are introduced as well as ideas of utilizing the framework in a flexible way to derive further variants.