The increasing demand for advanced applications of ultrafast lasers creates an urgent need to develop techniques for the on-demand manipulation of ultrashort pulses. In dissipative systems, multi-pulse structures, which suffer from composite-balance problems involving the gain/loss and dispersion/nonlinearity, yield versatile ultrafast soliton dynamics. Recent research indicates that various pulse characteristics, including the number of pulses, temporal separation, and relative phase, can be artificially manipulated, which leads to the concept of upgrading the on-demand manipulation of multi-pulse structures. Here, we first introduce the multi-pulse soliton dynamics and real-time spectral monitoring methods. Then, we review the approaches for artificially manipulating multi-pulse structures based on gain control, polarization control, dispersion control, and optomechanical effect. We also discuss their performances and corresponding application perspectives.