Based on the elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) for multi-objective optimization problems, an improved scheme with self-adaptive crossover and mutation operators is proposed to obtain good optimization performance in this paper. The performance of the improved NSGA-II is demonstrated with a set of test functions and metrics taken from the standard literature on multi-objective optimization. Combined with the HFSS solver, one pixel antenna with reconfigurable radiation patterns, which can steer its beam into six different directions (θDOA = ± 15°, ± 30°, ± 50°) with a 5 % overlapping impedance bandwidth (S11 < − 10 dB) and a realized gain over 6 dB, is designed by the proposed self-adaptive NSGA-II
