Evolutionary Competitive Multitasking Optimization

Abstract

This article introduces a special multitasking optimization problem (MTOP) called the competitive MTOP (CMTOP). Its distinctive characteristics are that all tasks’ objectives are comparable, and its optimal solution is the best one among the optimal solutions of all the individual problems. This article proposes an evolutionary algorithm with an online resource allocation strategy and an adaptive information transfer mechanism to solve the CMTOP. The experimental results on benchmark and real-world problems show that our proposed algorithm is effective and efficient.