A multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm with two-stage archive maintenance and auxiliary archive guidance

Abstract In Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), the external archive largely determines how well convergence and diversity are balanced. Ineffective archive maintenance may lead to uneven solution distributions, inaccurate convergence, and premature trapping in local regions.To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes TAMOPSO, a Two-stage Archive Maintenance-based Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. In the first stage, adaptive grids with dynamic boundary expansion are used to locate high-density regions. In the second stage, solutions in these regions are evaluated by integrating angle-based diversity assessment and a dual-distance convergence metric, with selection preferences adaptively adjusted according to the evolutionary stage, thereby improving the distribution and Pareto-front coverage of the obtained solution set while controlling archive size. To further enhance particle guidance, a bounded auxiliary archive is introduced to reuse historical high-quality non-dominated solutions discarded during archive maintenance and assist personal best updates. In addition, a stagnation detection-based particle reconstruction strategy is designed, using sparsely distributed elite solutions from the external archive as reconstruction templates to guide stagnant particles back to promising search regions and enhance global exploration. Tests on representative benchmark suites indicate that TAMOPSO produces higher-quality approximation sets than the compared mainstream algorithms in most cases.