Enhanced Competitive Swarm Optimizer for Multi-task Optimization
Wei Li, Junqing Yuan, Haonan Luo, Lei Zhou, Qingzheng Xu · 2020
In the real world, many problems possess the high degree of similarity. Inspired by multifactorial inheritance model, evolutionary multi-task optimization paradigm is proposed to simultaneously solve multiple optimization problems. However, experimental results have revealed that the performance of multifactorial evolutionary algorithm deteriorates with negative knowledge transfer between uncorrelated tasks. To alleviate this issue, we proposed an enhanced competitive swarm optimizer to explore the generality of the multitasking paradigm. A new velocity update mechanism for losers is proposed to improve the search ability. Further, a mating approach is proposed to transfer implicit knowledge among tasks for generating offspring. Experimental and statistical analyses are performed on CEC2017 evolutionary multitask optimization competition. Results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive in comparison with other state-of-the-art multifactorial optimization algorithms.