Knowledge Classification-Assisted Evolutionary Multitasking for Two-Task Multiobjective Optimization Problems

Abstract

To realize Industry 5.0, manufacturers face various optimization problems that seldom appear in isolation. Evolutionary MultiTasking (EMT) is an effective method to solve multiple related problems by extracting and utilizing common knowledge. Knowledge transfer is the key to the effectiveness of EMT. Existing EMT methods mainly focus on designing effective intertask learning methods and ignore the fact that provided knowledge's appropriateness also has a significant effect on EMT's performance. There is plentiful knowledge in assistant tasks, and knowledge transfer may not work well and even lead to a negative effect if useless knowledge is selected to guide target tasks. EMT is thus confronted with a challenge to find appropriate knowledge. This work proposes an efficient knowledge classification-assisted EMT framework to identify and select valuable knowledge from assistant tasks. During the evolution process, better-performing candidates are supposed to have advantages in exploitation. Therefore, assistant individuals that are similar to better-performing target individuals are used to provide positive knowledge. Specifically, the target sub-population is divided into different levels and then a classifier is trained to divide assistant sub-population. Considering that target and assistant sub-populations have different characteristics, we use domain adaptation to reduce their distribution discrepancies. In this way, the trained classifier can classify assistant individuals more accurately, and truly useful knowledge can be selected for target tasks. The superior performance of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art algorithms is verified via a series of benchmark problems.