Special Session on

Memetic Algorithms for Hard to Solve Problems

2009 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

May 18 - 21, 2009, Trondheim, Norway


Special Session Organizers

Dr. Ferrante Neri
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
neferran@cc.jyu.fi

A\Prof. Pablo Moscato
University of Newcastle, Australia
Pablo.Moscato@newcastle.edu.au

Prof. Hisao Ishibuchi
Osaka Prefecture
University, Japan
hisaoi@ie.osakafu-u.ac.jp


Scientific Program Committee

Andrea Caponio, Italy

Carlos Cotta, Spain

Raymond Chiong, Malaysia

Steven Gustafson, USA

Anna Kononova, UK

Natalio Krasnogor, UK

Han La Poutre, The Netherlands

Timo Mantere, Finland

Peter Merz, Germany

Yew-Soon Ong, Singapore

James Smith, UK

Ville Tirronen, Finland

Shengxiang Yang, UK


Motivation

One of the recent growing areas in Evolutionary Algorithm (EAs) research is Memetic Algorithms (MAs). MAs are population-based meta-heuristic search methods inspired by Darwinian principles of natural evolution and Dawkins notion of a meme defined as a unit of cultural evolution that is capable of local refinements. Recent studies on MAs have revealed their successes on a wide variety of real world problems. Particularly, they not only converge to high quality solutions, but also search more efficiently than their conventional counterparts. In diverse contexts, MAs are also commonly known as hybrid EAs, Baldwinian EAs, Lamarkian EAs, cultural algorithms and genetic local search.


Topics

The aim of this special session is to reflect the most recent advances in the field, and propose novel algorithmic implementations of MAs oriented towards specific problem which are hard to solve by classical optimization methods and popular meta-heuristics. A high emphasis will be given to the problems of balancing global and local search and on the techniques for obtaining an efficient coordination of the local search within an evolutionary framework. Both theoretical and empirical works are in the scope of this session. Some examples of the aforementioned hard to solve problems by means of Memetic Computing are:


  • dynamic optimization problems

  • noisy fitness landscapes

  • computationally expensive optimization problems

  • large scale problems

  • multi-objective problems

  • real-world applications


    Submission Guidelines

    Manuscripts should be prepared according to the standard format of regular papers specified in IEEE CEC 2009. Paper submission is online through the CEC 2009 submission website http://www.cec-2009.org/index.shtml . Special session papers will be treated in the same way as regular papers and included in the conference proceedings.


    Post-conference publication

Some of the most interesting papers of this special session will be invited, in an extended version, for a submission to Memetic Computing Journal, Springer, thematic issue on 'Memetic Computing in the Presence of Uncertainties'.


Important Dates

Paper Submission: November 1, 2008

Decision Notification: January 16, 2009

Camera-Ready Submission: February 16, 2009