Reinvestigation of evolutionary many-objective optimization: Focus on the Pareto knee front

•Adaptive strategies are proposed to detect the knee point, and obtain the corresponding Pareto knee front, respectively.•The adaptive knee strategy can be integrated into NSGA-II and MOEA/D as well as other MOEAs.•A comparison of different knee detection metrics is conducted. The distance-based metric is the most competitive.•The proposed method performs well on MOPs with up to 15 objectives.