MO-MFCGA: Multiobjective multifactorial cellular genetic algorithm for evolutionary multitasking

Multiobjetive optimization has gained a considerable momentum in the evolutionary computation scientific community. Methods coming from evolutionary computation have shown a remarkable performance for solving this kind of optimization problems thanks to their implicit parallelism and the simultaneous convergence towards the Pareto front. In any case, the resolution of multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) from the perspective of multitasking optimization remains almost unexplored. Multitasking is an incipient research stream which explores how multiple optimization problems can be simultaneously addressed by performing a single search process. The main motivation behind this solving paradigm is to exploit the synergies between the different problems (or tasks) being optimized. Going deeper, we resort in this paper to the also recent paradigm Evolutionary Multitasking (EM). We introduce the adaptation of the recently proposed Multifactorial Cellular Genetic Algorithm (MFCGA) for solving MOPs, giving rise to the Multiobjective MFCGA (MO-MFCGA). An extensive performance analysis is conducted using the Multiobjective Multifactorial Evolutionary Algorithm as comparison baseline. The experimentation is conducted over 10 multitasking setups, using the Multiobjective Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem as benchmarking problem. We also perform a deep analysis on the genetic transferability among the problem instances employed, using the synergies among tasks aroused along the MO-MFCGA search procedure