[alife] [CfP] Special Session and Competition on Large Scale Global Optimization

[Thomas Weise]

Call for Papers and Participations

CEC 2012 Special Session and Competition on Large Scale Global
Optimization


In the past two decades, different kinds of nature-inspired
optimization algorithms have been developed and applied to solve
optimization problems, including Simulated Annealing (SA),
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), Differential Evolution (DE), Particle
Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Estimation of
Distribution Algorithms (EDA), etc. Although these approaches have
shown excellent search abilities when applying to some small or medium
size problems, many of them will encounter severe difficulties when
applying to large scale problems, e.g., problems with up to 1000
variables. The reasons appear to be two-fold. First, the complexity of
a problem usually increases with the number of decision variables,
number of constraints, or even number of objectives (for multi-
objective optimization). This emergent complexity might prevent a
previously successful search strategy from finding the optimal
solution. Second, the solution space of the problem increases
exponentially with the number of decision variables, and a more
efficient search strategy is required to explore all the promising
regions with limited computational resources.

Historically, scaling up EAs to large scale problems has attracted
much interest, including both theoretical and practical studies.
However, existing work in the areas of EAs are still limited given the
significance of the scalability issue. Due to this fact, this special
session is devoted to highlight the recent advances in EAs for large
scale optimization problems, involving single objective or multiple
objectives, unconstrained or constrained problems, binary or discrete
or real or mixed decision variables. Specifically, we encourage
interested researchers to submit their latest work on:
o Both theoretical and experimental analysis of the scalability of EAs.
o Novel approaches and algorithms for scaling up EAs to large scale
  optimization problems.
o Applications of EAs to real-world large scale optimization problems. 
o Papers on novel test suites that help us in understanding problem
  characteristics are also welcome. 

Furthermore, a competition on Large-Scale Numerical Optimization will
also be organized in company with our special session. This
competition is built on the successful special session and competition
on LSGO in CEC’2010. For the competition in CEC’2012, the previously
proposed CEC’2010 benchmark test suite, which consists of 20 benchmark
test functions capturing a range of problem characteristics, will be
used. Participants of the competition will be required to evaluate
their existing or novel algorithms using the test suite, and are
welcome to report their approaches and results in a paper submitted to
the special session. The competition will provide the participants a
great opportunity to compare their LSGO algorithms with others.

For more information about the special session and competition, such
as the deadlines and the benchmark problems, please visit the
corresponding webpages:
For Special Session: http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~ketang/cec2012/cec2012lsgo.htm
For Competition: http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~ketang/cec2012/lsgo_competition.htm


Special Session and Competition Organizers:

Ke Tang
Nature Inspired Computation and Applications Laboratory (NICAL), 
School of Computer Science and Technology, 
University of Science and Technology of China, China
ketang at ustc.edu.cn

Zhenyu Yang
Department of Computer Science and Technology 
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
zhyyang at cs.ecnu.edu.cn

Thomas Weise
Nature Inspired Computation and Applications Laboratory (NICAL), 
School of Computer Science and Technology, 
University of Science and Technology of China , China
tweise at ustc.edu.cn