Abstract
Evolutionary multitasking is a significant emerging search paradigm that utilizes evolutionary algorithms to concurrently optimize multiple tasks. The multi-factorial evolutionary algorithm renders an effectual realization of evolutionary multitasking on two or three tasks. However, there remains room for improvement on the performance and capability of evolutionary multitasking. Beyond three tasks, this paper proposes a novel framework, called the symbiosis in biocoenosis optimization (SBO), to address evolutionary many-tasking optimization. The SBO leverages the notion of symbiosis in biocoenosis for transferring information and knowledge among different tasks through three major components: 1) transferring information through inter-task individual replacement, 2) measuring symbiosis through inter-task paired evaluations, and 3) coordinating the frequency and quantity of transfer based on symbiosis in biocoenosis. The inter-task individual replacement with paired evaluations caters for estimation of symbiosis, while the symbiosis in biocoenosis provides a good estimator of transfer. This study examines the effectiveness and efficiency of the SBO on a suite of many-tasking benchmark problems, designed to deal with 30 tasks simultaneously. The experimental results show that SBO leads to better solutions and faster convergence than the state-of-the-art evolutionary multitasking algorithms. Moreover, the results indicate that SBO is highly capable of identifying the similarity between problems and transferring information appropriately.