Design of a matrix hydraulic turbine using a metamodel-assisted evolutionary algorithm with PCA-driven evolution operators (Q427156)

Summary: To overcome the excessive CPU cost of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) which make use of demanding evaluation models, metamodel-assisted EAs (MAEAs) have been devised and used in either single-objective (SOO) or multi-objective (MOO) problems. MAEAs are based on low-cost surrogate evaluation models that screen out non-promising individuals during the evolution and exclude them from the expensive, problem-specific evaluation. This paper proposes a new technique that further reduces the computational cost of MAEAs. This technique is based on the principal-component-analysis (PCA) of non-dominated individuals (in MOO) within each generation, to identify dependences among the design variables and, through appropriate rotations, use this piece of information to efficiently `drive' the application of the evolution operators. The proposed technique is used to perform the multi-operating point design of a matrix hydraulic turbine, where each evaluation is based on a 3D computational fluid dynamics code; this is a highly constrained optimisation problem with many objectives, which is herein handled as a two-objective one. Some convincing mathematical function minimisation problems are also worked out using PCA-driven EAs; it is, thus, shown that the PCA-driven evolution operators can be used with or without metamodels.