  Elitism, which constructs the new population by preserving best solutions out
of the old population and newly-generated solutions, has been a default way for
population update since its introduction into multi-objective evolutionary
algorithms (MOEAs) in the late 1990s. In this paper, we take an opposite
perspective to conduct the population update in MOEAs by simply discarding
elitism. That is, we treat the newly-generated solutions as the new population
directly (so that all selection pressure comes from mating selection). We
propose a simple non-elitist MOEA (called NE-MOEA) that only uses Pareto
dominance sorting to compare solutions, without involving any diversity-related
selection criterion. Preliminary experimental results show that NE-MOEA can
compete with well-known elitist MOEAs (NSGA-II, SMS-EMOA and NSGA-III) on
several combinatorial problems. Lastly, we discuss limitations of the proposed
non-elitist algorithm and suggest possible future research directions.
