Workshop Announcement and Call for Participation

"Evolutionary Algorithms for Dynamic Optimization Problems"

a Workshop of

The 2001 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2001)

July 7, 2001
San Francisco, California, USA

Motivation

Many real-world optimization problems are actually dynamic. New jobs are to be added to the schedule, the quality of the raw material may be changing, new orders have to be included into the vehicle routing problem etc.

In such cases, when the problem changes over the course of the optimization, the purpose of the optimization algorithm changes from finding an optimal solution to being able to continuously track the movement of the optimum through time. Since in a sense natural evolution is a process of continuous adaptation, it seems straightforward to consider evolutionary algorithms as appropriate candidates for dynamic optimization problems.

And indeed, the number of papers published in that area is rising continuously.
Most of these publications can be grouped into one of the following basic categories:

  1. Identify the occourence of a change in the environment and then deliberately increase diversity in the population e.g. by means of increased mutation
  2. Try to avoid convergence all the time, e.g. by including new random individuals in the population in every generation
  3. Supply the EA with a memory, e.g. by using diploidy or an explicit memory, so that the EA can recall useful information from past generations.
  4. Using multiple populations to cover several promising areas of the search space simultaneously.

The goal of the workshop will be to foster interest in the subject, get together researchers working on that topic, and achieve an informal agreement on some of the key issues in the field.

A similar workshop has been held at GECCO-99 with more than 100 participants. Now, two years later, it seems to be time for an update.

Preliminary Workshop Agenda

9:00Evolutionary Approaches for Dynamic Optimization Problems - an Updated Survey (Jürgen Branke)
9:20Explicit Speciation with few a priori Parameters for Dynamic Optimization Problems (Christopher Ronnewinkel, Thomas Martinez)
9:40A futurist approach to dynamic environments (Jano van Hemert, Clarissa Van Hoyweghen, Eduard Lukshandl, Katja Verbeeck)
10:00On Genetic and Environment Identifying Approaches to Adaptation to Changing Environments (Naoki Mori, Toshihiro Kuda, Keinosuke Matsumoto)
10:20Break
10:40Anticipation Optimization in Dynamic Job Shops (Marko Snoek)
11:00Dynamic Pareto Optimum GA against the changing environments (Kazuo Yamasaki)
11:20Search for optimum in dynamic environment: a efficient agent-based method (Alain Berro and Yves Duthen)
11:40Break
11:50Panel Discussion
12:30End of the workshop


We are open for topics that should be discussed during the panel discussion.
Here are some preliminary ideas: If you have further suggestions, please send us an email!

Your Contribution

Paper submission deadline has passed, but you can still participate by

The workshop is open to all registered attendees of the GECCO-2001 conference.

We are looking forward to an interesting workshop and to seeing you at Orlando.

For further inquiries, please send email to gecco@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de or contact one of the workshop chairs.
 
  Workshop Chairs:
Jürgen Branke 
Institute AIFB
University of Karlsruhe 
76128 Karlsruhe, Germany 
Phone : ++49 (721) 608-6585
Fax : ++49 (721) 693717 
email: branke@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/Staff/jbr.engl.html 		 Thomas Bäck 
Center for Applied Systems Analysis (CASA) 
Informatik Centrum Dortmund (ICD) 
Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Str. 20 
D-44227 Dortmund, Germany 
and 
Department of Computer Science 
Leiden University 
Niels Bohrweg 1 
NL-2333 CA Leiden, The Netherlands 
Phone : +49-231-9700-366 
Fax : +49-231-9700-959 
email: baeck@icd.de
http://www.icd.de
 
 

Program Committee:

Ken DeJong (USA)
Naoki Mori (Japan)
Christopher Ronnewinkel (Germany)
Karsten Weicker (Germany)