  Most multi-objective optimisation algorithms maintain an archive explicitly
or implicitly during their search. Such an archive can be solely used to store
high-quality solutions presented to the decision maker, but in many cases may
participate in the search process (e.g., as the population in evolutionary
computation). Over the last two decades, archiving, the process of comparing
new solutions with previous ones and deciding how to update the
archive/population, stands as an important issue in evolutionary
multi-objective optimisation (EMO). This is evidenced by constant efforts from
the community on developing various effective archiving methods, ranging from
conventional Pareto-based methods to more recent indicator-based and
decomposition-based ones. However, the focus of these efforts is on empirical
performance comparison in terms of specific quality indicators; there is lack
of systematic study of archiving methods from a general theoretical
perspective. In this paper, we attempt to conduct a systematic overview of
multi-objective archiving, in the hope of paving the way to understand
archiving algorithms from a holistic perspective of theory and practice, and
more importantly providing a guidance on how to design theoretically desirable
and practically useful archiving algorithms. In doing so, we also present that
archiving algorithms based on weakly Pareto compliant indicators (e.g.,
epsilon-indicator), as long as designed properly, can achieve the same
theoretical desirables as archivers based on Pareto compliant indicators (e.g.,
hypervolume indicator). Such desirables include the property limit-optimal, the
limit form of the possible optimal property that a bounded archiving algorithm
can have with respect to the most general form of superiority between solution
sets.
