MToP: A MATLAB Optimization Platform for Evolutionary Multitasking

Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) has emerged as a popular topic of evolutionary computation over the past years. It aims to concurrently address multiple optimization tasks within limited computing resources, leveraging inter-task knowledge transfer techniques. Despite the abundance of multitask evolutionary algorithms (MTEAs) proposed for multitask optimization (MTO), there remains a comprehensive software platform to help researchers evaluate MTEA performance on benchmark MTO problems as well as explore real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first open-source optimization platform, named MTO-Platform (MToP), for EMT. MToP incorporates over 40 MTEAs, more than 150 MTO problem cases with real-world applications, and over 10 performance metrics. Moreover, to facilitate comparative analyses between MTEAs and traditional evolutionary algorithms, we adapted over 40 popular single-task evolutionary algorithms to address MTO problems. MToP boasts a user-friendly graphical interface, facilitating results analysis, data export, and schematics visualization. More importantly, MToP is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing users to develop new algorithms and tackle emerging problem domains. The source code of MToP is available at https://github.com/intLyc/MTO-Platform.