Diversified Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Multitasking Particle Swarm Optimization

Evolutionary multitasking optimization (EMTO) has capability of performing a population of individuals together by sharing their intrinsic knowledge. However, the existed methods of EMTO mainly focus on improving its convergence using parallelism knowledge belonging to different tasks. This fact may lead to the problem of local optimization in EMTO due to unexploited knowledge on behalf of the diversity. To address this problem, in this article, a diversified knowledge transfer strategy is proposed for multitasking particle swarm optimization algorithm (DKT-MTPSO). First, according to the state of population evolution, an adaptive task selection mechanism is introduced to manage the source tasks that contribute to the target tasks. Second, a diversified knowledge reasoning strategy is designed to capture the knowledge of convergence, as well as the knowledge associated with diversity. Third, a diversified knowledge transfer method is developed to expand the region of generated solutions guided by acquired knowledge with different transfer patterns so that the search space of tasks can be explored comprehensively, which is favor of EMTO alleviating local optimization. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in comparison with some other state-of-the-art EMTO algorithms on multiobjective multitasking benchmark test suits, and the practicality of the algorithm is verified in a real-world application study. The results of experiments demonstrate the superiority of DKT-MTPSO compared to other algorithms.