Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at ​GECCO 2016

Description & Topics

Evolutionary computation (EC) methods are applied in many different domains. Therefore soundly engineered, reusable, flexible, user-friendly, and interoperable software systems are more than ever required to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical application. However, due to the heterogeneity of the application domains and the large number of EC methods, the development of such systems is both, time consuming and complex. Consequently many EC researchers still implement individual and highly specialized software which is often developed from scratch, concentrates on a specific research question, and does not follow state of the art software engineering practices. By this means the chance to reuse existing systems and to provide systems for others to build their work on is not sufficiently seized within the EC community. In many cases the developed systems are not even publicly released, which makes the comparability and traceability of research results very hard.

This workshop enables EC researchers to exchange their ideas on how to develop and apply generic and reusable EC software systems and to present open and freely available solutions on which others can build their work on. Furthermore, the workshop should help to identify common efforts in the development of EC software systems and should highlight cooperation potentials and synergies between different research groups. It concentrates on the importance of high-quality software systems and professional software engineering in the field of EC and provides a platform for EC researchers to discuss the following and other related topics:

• development and application of generic and reusable EC software systems
• architectural and design patterns for EC software systems
• software modeling of EC algorithms and problems
• open-source EC software systems
• expandability, interoperability, and standardization
• comparability and traceability of research results
• graphical user interfaces and visualization
• comprehensive statistical and graphical results analysis
• parallelism and performance
• usability and automation
• comparison and evaluation of EC software systems

Important Dates

Submission deadline:	April 3rd, 2016
Notification of acceptance:	April 20th, 2016
Camera-ready submission:	May 8th, 2016
Workshop at ​GECCO 2016:	July 21st, 2016

Submission Guidelines

Authors should send their papers to ​evosoft@heuristiclab.com until April 3rd, 2016. All workshop papers have to fulfill the preparation instructions for GECCO'16 full papers. Detailed formatting instructions for authors are listed ​here.

Program

Location: Room Wind River A, Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center, Denver, CO, USA
Date: July 21st, 2016
Time: 08:30 - 10:20

Session 1 (Chairs: Stefan Wagner & Michael Affenzeller)
08:30	Welcome & Introduction	S. Wagner
08:40	elephant56: Design and Implementation of a Parallel Genetic Algorithms Framework on Hadoop MapReduce	P. Salza, F. Ferrucci, F. Sarro
09:10	NodIO: A Framework and Architecture for Pool-based Evolutionary Computation	J.-J. Merelo, P. A. Castillo, P. García-Sánchez, P. de las Cuevas, M. García-Valdez
09:40	Optimization Knowledge Center - A Decision Support System for Heuristic Optimization	A. Beham, S. Wagner, M. Affenzeller
10:10	Closing Remarks	M. Affenzeller

Workshop Chairs

​Stefan Wagner, Austria
Stefan Wagner received his MSc in computer science in 2004 and his PhD in technical sciences in 2009, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. From 2005 to 2009 he worked as an associate professor for software project engineering and since 2009 as a full professor for complex software systems at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg, Austria. Dr. Wagner is one of the founders of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL) and is the project manager and head developer of the HeuristicLab optimization environment.

​Michael Affenzeller, Austria
Michael Affenzeller has published several papers, journal articles and books dealing with theoretical and practical aspects of evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, and meta-heuristics in general. In 2001 he received his PhD in engineering sciences and in 2004 he received his habilitation in applied systems engineering, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Michael Affenzeller is professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg, and head of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL).

Previous EvoSoft Workshops

EvoSoft at GECCO 2015
EvoSoft at GECCO 2014
EvoSoft at GECCO 2013
EvoSoft at GECCO 2012