Real Parameter Optimization:

From Benchmarking To Real World Applications

Session organizers: José M. Valls and José García-Nieto (jvalls@inf.uc3m.es, jnieto@lcc.uma.es)

SESSION DESCRIPTION

Difficult real-parameter (continuous) optimization problems appearing in academic, scientific, and industrial domains have been addressed by a variety of both metaheuristic and classical optimization techniques: evolutionary algorithms such as Evolution Strategies, Differential Evolution, and Particle Swarm Optimization, classical methods such as Quasi-Newton, Hybrid methods, and other non-evolutionary methods such as Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search, among others. In many of the related studies, a subset of the standard test problems (Sphere, Schwefel's, Rosenbrock's, Rastrigin's, etc.) has been considered, once they have been numerically treated to represent actually interesting problems (as done in standard bechnmarks such as:  CEC’05, CEC0’08, BBOB’09, etc.).

The use of these standard functions allows the comparison of algorithms in the same conditions and with a common and systematic parameter setting. Since many of these standard benchmark functions can approximate search spaces of real-world industry problems, choosing the most suitable algorithms and parameters for them is a crucial task before dealing with real-world problems which are also important for themselves (also in this section). The sustained research effort over recent years has succeeded in achieving many practical and theoretical results in the development and application of new techniques for solving real-world optimization problems. The aim of this special session is to present and discuss on the most recent advances in this field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Metaheuristics in real-parameter benchmark functions,
• Metaheuristics in real-parameter real-world problems,
• Metaheuristics in real-parameter machine-learning problems,
• Comparisons across techniques in real-world problems,
• Comparisons across techniques in benchmark functions,
• Parallel extensions and/or hybridizations of existing metaheuristics,
• Self-adapting techniques in metaheuristics,
• New real-world problems solved with metaheuristics,
• Large scale real-parameter problem solving,
• Metaheuristics for real-parameter multiobjective optimization in real-world problems and/or benchmark functions

DEADLINES

• Submission of a paper: May 15, 2010 June 15, 2010
• Notification: July 15, 2010
• Camera-ready version: September 15, 2010
• Conference: October 28-30, 2010

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS

Submission of papers should be in the form of a 2-page abstract (including figures, tables, and references) in ENGLISH (only PDF is accepted). Extended versions of selected papers will be considered for publication in the following journals:

• COR: Computers and Operations Research
• ITOR: International Transactions in Operational Research
• JMMA: Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Algorithms