Behavior of Crossover Operators in NSGA-III for Large-Scale Optimization Problems

•The performance of three crossover operators of NSGA-III algorithm on big data optimization problems are investigated.•By introducing the concept of Stud, several improved crossover operators of SBX, UC, and SI have been designed.•Ten variants of NSGA-III algorithms are proposed.•The performance of ten NSGA-III variants are further verified on big data optimization problems.