Half a Dozen Real-World Applications of Evolutionary Multitasking and More

Until recently, the potential to transfer evolved skills across distinct optimization problem instances (or tasks) was seldom explored in evolutionary computation. The concept of evolutionary multitasking (EMT) fills this gap. It unlocks a population's implicit parallelism to jointly solve a set of tasks, hence creating avenues for skills transfer between them. Despite it being early days, the idea of EMT has begun to show promise in a range of real-world applications. In the backdrop of recent advances, the contribution of this paper is twofold. We first present a review of several application-oriented explorations of EMT in the literature, assimilating them into half a dozen broad categories according to their respective application areas. Within each category, the fundamental motivations for multitasking are discussed, together with an illustrative case study. Second, we present a set of recipes by which general problem formulations of practical interest, those that cut across different disciplines, could be transformed in the new light of EMT. We intend our discussions to not only underscore the practical utility of existing EMT methods, but also spark future research toward novel algorithms crafted for real-world deployment.