Analysis of a simple evolutionary algorithm for the multiobjective shortest path problem

Abstract

We present a natural fitness function f for the multiobjective shortest path problem, which is a fundamental multiobjective combinatorial optimization problem known to be NP-hard. Thereafter, we conduct a rigorous runtime analysis of a simple evolutionary algorithm (EA) optimizing f. Interestingly, this simple general algorithm is a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) for the problem under consideration, which exemplifies how EAs are able to find good approximate solutions for hard problems.