Decision variable classification based multi-objective multifactorial memetic algorithm for multi-objective multi-task optimization problem

Abstract

Multi-task multi-objective optimization problems need to consider the algorithm's convergence and the population's diversity. The information transfer of decision variables with different characteristics may harm the effect of knowledge reuse. This paper proposes a novel hybrid multi-objective multifactorial memetic algorithm to address this issue. The proposed variable classification method will classify decision variables into convergence-related and diversity-related decision variables. Only the same type of decision variables in the source and target tasks can transfer information to avoid negative transfer. Different evolutionary operators are adopted according to the characteristics of decision variables during individual recombination. In addition, the proposed algorithm hybridizes the immune algorithm as the global evolutionary operator and the evolutionary gradient search algorithm as the local search operator into the multifactorial framework to enhance the searching ability. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with the state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary multitasking algorithms. The results of the experiments show that the proposed algorithm can achieve promising performance on the classical and complex multi-task multi-objective benchmark test suites.