  Evolutionary computing (EC) is widely used in dealing with combinatorial
optimization problems (COP). Traditional EC methods can only solve a single
task in a single run, while real-life scenarios often need to solve multiple
COPs simultaneously. In recent years, evolutionary multitasking optimization
(EMTO) has become an emerging topic in the EC community. And many methods have
been designed to deal with multiple COPs concurrently through exchanging
knowledge. However, many-task optimization, cross-domain knowledge transfer,
and negative transfer are still significant challenges in this field. A new
evolutionary multitasking algorithm based on adaptive seed transfer (MTEA-AST)
is developed for multitasking COPs in this work. First, a dimension unification
strategy is proposed to unify the dimensions of different tasks. And then, an
adaptive task selection strategy is designed to capture the similarity between
the target task and other online optimization tasks. The calculated similarity
is exploited to select suitable source tasks for the target one and determine
the transfer strength. Next, a task transfer strategy is established to select
seeds from source tasks and correct unsuitable knowledge in seeds to suppress
negative transfer. Finally, the experimental results indicate that MTEA-AST can
adaptively transfer knowledge in both same-domain and cross-domain many-task
environments. And the proposed method shows competitive performance compared to
other state-of-the-art EMTOs in experiments consisting of four COPs.
