Evolutionary many-tasking based on biocoenosis through symbiosis: A framework and benchmark problems

Evolutionary multitasking is an emergent topic in evolutionary computation area. Recently, a well-known evolutionary multitasking method, the multi-factorial evolutionary algorithm (MFEA), has been proposed and applied to concurrently solve two or three problems. In MFEA, individuals of different tasks are recombined in a predefined random mating probability. As the number of tasks increases, such recombination of different tasks becomes very frequent, thereby detracting the search from any specific problems and limiting the MFEA's capability to solve many-tasking problems. This study proposes a general framework, called the evolution of biocoenosis through symbiosis (EBS), for evolutionary algorithms to deal with the many-tasking problems. The EBS has two main features: the selection of candidates from concatenate offspring and the adaptive control of information exchange among tasks. The concatenate offspring represent a set of offspring used for all tasks. Moreover, this study presents a test suite of many-tasking problems (MaTPs), modified from the CEC 2014 benchmark problems. The Spearman correlation is adopted to analyze the effect of the shifts of optima on the MaTPs. Experimental results show that the effectiveness of EBS is superior to that of single task optimization and MFEA on the four MaTPs. The results also validate that EBS is capable of exploiting the synergy of fitness landscapes.

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