Evolutionary competitive multitasking optimization via improved adaptive differential evolution.

Competitive multitasking optimization (CMTO) is a special multitasking optimization paradigm that has been recently proposed. In the CMTO problems, the objective values of all tasks are competitive, and the purpose of CMTO is to find an optimal solution for multiple tasks. However, existing algorithms designed for the CMTO problems perform poorly since their resource allocation strategies are prone to incorrect task selection. To remedy this drawback, this paper proposes an improved multitasking adaptive differential evolution, which can be featured as: (i) a success-history based resource allocation strategy is proposed; (ii) an adaptive random mating probability control strategy is devised to adapt to different task combinations; (iii) an adaptive multitasking differential evolution operator is designed to enhance the searchability. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, three CMTO benchmark test suites and two real-world optimization problems are chosen. Compared with other related methods, the results show that the proposed method achieved better performance empirically. • Competitive multitasking optimization has good practical significance. • A powerful competitive multitasking evolutionary algorithm is proposed. • A success-history based resource allocation strategy is designed. • An improved differential evolution operator is used to enhance searchability. • An adaptive RMP control strategy is devised for different task combinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]