What is NAUTILUS?

Most interactive methods developed for solving multiobjective optimization problems sequentially generate Pareto optimal solutions and the decision maker must always trade-off to get a new solution. Instead, the family of interactive trade-off-free methods called NAUTILUS starts from the worst possible objective values and improves every objective function step by step according to the preferences of the decision maker.

Recently, the NAUTILUS family has been presented as a general NAUTILUS framework consisting of several modules. To extend the applicability of interactive methods, it is recommended that a reliable software implementation, which can be easily connected to different simulators or modelling tools, is publicly available. In this paper, we bridge the gap between presenting an algorithm and implementing it and propose a general software framework for the NAUTILUS family which facilitates the implementation of all the NAUTILUS methods, and even other interactive methods. This software framework has been designed following an object-oriented architecture and consists of several software blocks designed to cover independently the different requirements of the NAUTILUS framework. To enhance wide applicability, the implementation is available as open source code.