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  Bridging the Gap Between Industry and Academia in Optimisation
                               (GECCO 2013 - Workshop)
   
  http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~cs378/GECCO2013Workshop/index.html
     
                               to be held as part of the
  2013 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2013)
                         July 6-10, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

                
Submission Deadline : March 28th, 2013
              

Description
This workshop, to be held during GECCO 2013 in Amsterdam,
The Netherlands between July 06-10, aims to address the gap between
current state-of-the art optimization techniques emerging in the
academic literature and the real concerns of those in industry who would
like to use the techniques.

Meta-heuristic optimisation techniques have been widely applied
to solving many practical problems arising in industrial domains, with
much success reported in the literature. However, there remains a
worrying void between scientific research into optimisation techniques
and those problems faced by end-users and addressed by commercial
optimisation software vendors. From a commercial perspective, the
problems addressed by academia are often too simplistic compared to
those faced in the real-world, failing to embrace many real-world
constraints (For example, even ‘rich-vehicle routing’ research fails to
address concerns of customers regarding non-trivial loading problems,
working-time legislation, rush-hour speed modelling and asymmetric
distance networks). From the scientific perspective, there is a lack of
advanced meta-heuristic techniques apparent in commercial software, that
has been attributed in part to the academic community failing to
demonstrate that their solutions are applicable to the needs of the
commercial world, and in part to academics failing to impart their
message the industrial community.

This workshop aims to address the gap between current state-of-the art
optimization techniques emerging in the academic literature and the real
concerns of those in industry who would like to use the techniques by
providing an opportunity for researchers to discuss:

Development of new benchmark sets of data that include relevant
real-world constraints to demonstrate relevance of academic techniques.
Metrics by which problems should be evaluated relevant to practitioners.
Methods for comparing algorithms that address concerns of practitioners.
Discussion of real-world problem constraints.

Papers are likely (but not limited to) to address one of the following :

Generation of new problems
- Creation of standards and metrics for evaluating and comparing algorithms
- Frameworks for comparing algorithms.
- Real-world constraints in a variety of domains.
- Practical applications of optimization algorithms

Workshop Chairs

Prof Emma Hart is an experienced researcher in the area of optmisation
and hyper-heuristics, being one of the original authors of the term
’hyper-heuristics’ in the early 2000s. She has published widely on
the use of evolutionary algorithms applied to scheduling and timetabling
problems, as well as in hyper-heuristics applied to a variety of domains.
She is currently the holder of a large national research grant,
investigating the use of hyper-heuristics that continuously learn and
improve over time, which has collaborators from the logistics and
forestry industry.

Kevin Sim is a researcher who works in the field of hyper-heuristics and
problem-classification algorithms, and works with Prof. Hart on a large
national grant on hyper-heuristics. He is also co-chair of a workshop at
Evo-Star 2013 called EvoIndustry.
 

Important Dates

Paper/Poster Submission: March 28 2013
Notification to Authors: April 15 2013
Camera ready Submission: April 25 2013
Conference Dates: July 06-10, 2013
Workshop Dates: T.B.A.

Further Information
Workshop Website
http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~cs378/GECCO2013Workshop/index.html
Conference website
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2013/