Traditional evolution algorithms tend to start the search from scratch. However, real-world problems seldom exist in isolation and humans effectively manage and execute multiple tasks at the same time. Inspired by this concept, the paradigm of multi-task evolutionary computation (MTEC) has recently emerged as an effective means of facilitating implicit or explicit knowledge transfer across optimization tasks, thereby potentially accelerating convergence and improving the quality of solutions for multi-task optimization problems. An increasing number of works have thus been proposed since 2016. The authors collect the abundant specialized literature related to this novel optimization paradigm that was published in the past five years. The quantity of papers, the nationality of authors, and the important professional publications are analyzed by a statistical method. As a survey on state-of-the-art of research on this topic, this review article covers basic concepts, theoretical foundation, basic implementation approaches of MTEC, related extension issues of MTEC, and typical application fields in science and engineering. In particular, several approaches of chromosome encoding and decoding, intro-population reproduction, inter-population reproduction, and evaluation and selection are reviewed when developing an effective MTEC algorithm. A number of open challenges to date, along with promising directions that can be undertaken to help move it forward in the future, are also discussed according to the current state. The principal purpose is to provide a comprehensive review and examination of MTEC for researchers in this community, as well as promote more practitioners working in the related fields to be involved in this fascinating territory.

In view of the limitations of traditional statistical methods in dealing with multifactor and nonlinear data and the inadequacy of classical machine learning algorithms in dealing with and predicting data with high dimensions and large sample sizes, this paper proposes an operational risk prediction model based on an automatic encoder and convolutional neural networks. First, we use an automatic encoder to extract features of motion risk factors and obtain feature components that can highly represent risk. Secondly, based on the causal relationship between sports risk and risk characteristics, a convolutional neural network with a dual convolution layer and dual pooling layer topology is constructed. Finally, the sports risk prediction model is established by combining the auto-coded feature components with the topology of the convolutional neural network. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed method can effectively analyze and extract risk characteristics and has a high prediction accuracy. At the same time, it promotes the integration of sports science and computer science and provides a basis for the application of machine learning in the field of sports risk prediction.

To improve the ability of the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in the exploitation process, an improved symmetric SCA with adaptive probability selection (SSCA-APS), is proposed. The search process of this algorithm is divided into early and late stages. In the early stage, the operators of the traditional SCA algorithm continue to be used. In the late stage, three improvements were applied. Firstly, the symmetric sine and cosine operators are proposed. The adaptive probability selection strategy is adopted to integrate original sine and cosine operators and symmetric sine and cosine operators for dynamically adjusting the step size of the search range. Furthermore, to prevent the population from falling into local optimization, Gaussian perturbation is used to mutate the globally optimal individuals of the current generation. In addition, the information of two randomly selected individuals and the globally optimal individual is integrated by quadratic interpolation to maintain population diversity and produce a new individual. 23 test functions were used to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the performance of the SSCA-APS algorithm has competitiveness when it is compared with classical SCA and some state-of-the-art SCA variants.

Many optimization problems can be found in scientific and engineering fields. It is a challenge for researchers to design efficient algorithms to solve these optimization problems. The Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which is inspired by the social behavior of bird flocks, is a global stochastic method. However, a monotonic and static learning model, which is applied for all particles, limits the exploration ability of PSO. To overcome the shortcomings, we propose an improving particle swarm optimization algorithm based on neighborhood and historical memory (PSONHM). In the proposed algorithm, every particle takes into account the experience of its neighbors and its competitors when updating its position. The crossover operation is employed to enhance the diversity of the population. Furthermore, a historical memory M_w is used to generate new inertia weight with a parameter adaptation mechanism. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, experiments are conducted with CEC2014 test problems on 30 dimensions. Finally, two classification problems are employed to investigate the efficiencies of PSONHM in training Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The experimental results indicate that the proposed PSONHM can effectively solve the global optimization problems.

Traditional route planning methods usually plan the “fastest” or “lowest cost” travel route for users with the goal of finding the shortest path or the lowest cost, but this method cannot meet the needs of tourism users for personalized and multifunctional travel routes. Given this phenomenon, this paper proposes a personalized route planning model based on urgency. First, the model uses the visitor’s historical tourism data and public road network data to extract their preferences, POI (point of interest) relationships, edge scenic values and other information. Then, the planned route function is determined according to the urgency value, which provides users with travel routes that accommodate their interest preferences and urgency. Finally, the improved genetic algorithm based on gene replacement and gene splicing operators is used to carry out numerical experiments on the Xi’an and Wuhan road network datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is not only capable of planning routes with different functions for diverse users but also performs personalized route planning according to their preferences.