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Workshop on Search and Selection in Continuous Domains

Abstract

A recurring theme in metaheuristics research is to consider the balance between Exploration and Exploitation. An often forgotten area of research is the effect of Selection on Search/Exploration. It is noted that Selection has the ability to turn any search process into a hill climber by rejecting all exploratory search solutions (and keeping only exploitative solutions). The first goal of this workshop will be to reanalyze current metaheuristics from the perspective of selection (as opposed to exploration and/or an underlying metaphor). Subsequent results/goals include a selection-based taxonomy for the explosion of metaphor-based metaheuristics, tools to accurately measure exploration and the effects of selection on exploratory search solutions, the identification and categorization of selection errors, and suggestions for future methods of selection and metaheuristic design.

Workshop Overview

The planned workshop is for a full day. The approximate format will be a 30 minute plenary to start the workshop and then progress updates of 20-30 minutes for each workshop participant with time for initial comments during the morning session. The afternoon session will focus on small group breakouts where each paper/project can receive in-depth feedback. The workshop will close with a summary of agreed work to finish the key projects. We will seek to fast-track the final papers to be concurrently published in a future edition Applied Soft Computing.

Call for Participation

We invite all interested researchers to join our workshop to expand upon related research topics such as
  • Benchmark problems for exploration
  • Methods for exploration (and their verification)
  • Observation of optima hopping behaviours in metaheuristics
  • Comparison of selection in combinatorial and continuous domains
  • Measurements of stall and/or selection errors
  • Non-fitness based methods of selection (for exploration)
  • A review of selection
Program

Sunday, June 30 in Room 423

14:10 - 14:25
Stephen Chen
Welcome and Introductions

14:25 - 14:50
Marjan Mernik
Exploration and Exploitation in Evolutionary Algorithms

14:50 - 15:15
Stephen Chen
From Elitist Selection to Optima Hopping

15:15 - 15:40
Jana Herzog
Failed Exploration in Differential Evolution

15:40 - 16:05
Tomofumi Kitamura
Differential Evolution with Unbounded Populations

16:05 - 16:20
Coffee break

16:20 - 16:45
Tim Hendtlass
Search Space generator

16:45 - 17:10
Stephen Chen and Marjan Mernik
Future work

17:10 - 18:20
Working groups

Workshop Organizers

Stephen Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on analyzing the mechanisms for selection, exploration, and exploitation in techniques designed for multi-modal optimization problems. He is particularly interested in the development and analysis of non-metaphor-based heuristic search techniques. He has conducted extensive research on Genetic algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimization. He has over 70 peer-reviewed publications including 30 CEC papers. He has previously presented 3 tutorials and organized 1 workshop at CEC/WCCI events and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Marjan Mernik is a professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests include programming languages, compilers, domain-specific (modeling) languages, grammar-based systems, grammatical inference, and evolutionary computations. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, and EAPLS. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Languages, as well as Associate Editors of the Applied Soft Computing Journal, Information Sciences Journal, and Swarm and Evolutionary Computation Journal. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher for the years 2017 and 2018.