Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at ​GECCO 2023

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 14th, 2023 (strict!)
Notification of acceptance:	May 3rd, 2023
Camera-ready submission:	May 10th, 2023
Hybrid workshop at ​GECCO 2023:	July 15th, 2023

Submission Guidelines

Authors have to submit their papers until April 14th, 2023 using the ​GECCO submission system. After login, authors need to select the "Workshop Paper" submission form and "Workshop Evolutionary Computation Software Systems" to submit their work to the EvoSoft Workshop.

All workshop papers must not exceed 8 pages and have to fulfill the preparation instructions for GECCO'23 full papers. Detailed formatting instructions for authors are listed ​here.

Program

Location: Room Madrid - Floor 12 and ​GECCO 2023 online platform
Date: July 15th, 2023
Time: 10:40 - 12:30 (WEST, UTC/GMT+1)

Session 1 (Chairs: Stefan Wagner & Michael Affenzeller)
10:40	Welcome & Opening	Stefan Wagner
10:44	Fast, Flexible, and Fearless: A Rust Framework for the Modular Construction of Metaheuristics	Jonathan Wurth, Helena Stegherr, Michael Heider, Leopold Luley, Jörg Hähner
11:01	Maelstrom: An Accelerator-compatible GP Framework	Deacon Seals, Robert Ethan Wilkes, Daniel R. Tauritz
11:18	A Joint Python/C++ Library for Efficient yet Accessible Black-Box and Gray-Box Optimization with GOMEA	Anton Bouter, Peter A.N. Bosman
11:35	PyScheduling: an Extensible and Easy-To-Use Python Framework for Scheduling Problems	Taha Arbaoui, Mohamed Elamine Athmani, Mohammed Henni, Akram Badreddine Laissaoui, Mourad Terzi
11:52	Replicable Self-Documenting Experiments with Arbitrary Search Spaces and Algorithms	Thomas Weise, Zhize Wu
12:09	Improving Time and Memory Efficiency of Genetic Algorithms by Storing Populations as Minimum Spanning Trees of Patches	Maxim Buzdalov
12:26	Closing Remarks	Michael 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 Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. From 2005 to 2009 he worked as associate professor for software project engineering and since 2009 as full professor for complex software systems at the Campus Hagenberg of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Stefan Wagner is one of the founders of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL) and is project manager and head architect of the open-source optimization environment HeuristicLab. He works as project manager and key researcher in several R&D projects on production and logistics optimization and his research interests are in the area of combinatorial optimization, evolutionary algorithms, computational intelligence, and parallel and distributed computing.

​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, head of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL), head of the Master degree program Software Engineering, vice-dean for research and development, and scientific director of the Softwarepark Hagenberg.

Previous EvoSoft Workshops

EvoSoft at GECCO 2022
EvoSoft at GECCO 2021
EvoSoft at GECCO 2020
EvoSoft at GECCO 2019
EvoSoft at GECCO 2018
EvoSoft at GECCO 2017
EvoSoft at GECCO 2016
EvoSoft at GECCO 2015
EvoSoft at GECCO 2014
EvoSoft at GECCO 2013
EvoSoft at GECCO 2012