Peter I. Cowling – författare

Evolutionary scheduling is a vital research domain at the interface of two important sciences - artificial intelligence and operational research. Scheduling problems are generally complex, large scale, constrained, and multi-objective in nature, and classical operational research techniques are often inadequate at solving them effectively. With the advent of computation intelligence, there is renewed interest in solving scheduling problems using evolutionary computational techniques. These techniques, which include genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolutionary strategies, memetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, ant colony systems, etc, are derived from biologically inspired concepts and are well-suited to solve scheduling problems since they are highly scalable and flexible in terms of handling constraints and multiple objectives. This edited book gives an overview of many of the current developments in the large and growing field of evolutionary scheduling, and demonstrates the applicability of evolutionary computational techniques to solve scheduling problems, not only to small-scale test problems, but also fully-fledged real-world problems. The intended readers of this book are engineers, researchers, practitioners, senior undergraduates, and graduate students who are interested in the field of evolutionary scheduling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2009, held in Tübingen, Germany, in April 2009. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers present the latest research and discuss current developments and applications in metaheuristics - a paradigm to effectively solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial, economical, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms and ant colony optimization.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2009, held in Tübingen, Germany, in April 2009. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers present the latest research and discuss current developments and applications in metaheuristics - a paradigm to effectively solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial, economical, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms and ant colony optimization.

Evolutionary scheduling is a vital research domain at the interface of two important sciences - artificial intelligence and operational research. Scheduling problems are generally complex, large scale, constrained, and multi-objective in nature, and classical operational research techniques are often inadequate at solving them effectively. With the advent of computation intelligence, there is renewed interest in solving scheduling problems using evolutionary computational techniques. These techniques, which include genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolutionary strategies, memetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, ant colony systems, etc, are derived from biologically inspired concepts and are well-suited to solve scheduling problems since they are highly scalable and flexible in terms of handling constraints and multiple objectives. This edited book gives an overview of many of the current developments in the large and growing field of evolutionary scheduling, and demonstrates the applicability of evolutionary computational techniques to solve scheduling problems, not only to small-scale test problems, but also fully-fledged real-world problems. The intended readers of this book are engineers, researchers, practitioners, senior undergraduates, and graduate students who are interested in the field of evolutionary scheduling.

Metaheuristicscontinuetodemonstratetheire?ectivenessforanever-broadening range of di?cult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in a wide - riety of industrial, economic, and scienti?c domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, ant colony optimization and estimation of distribution algorithms. Problems solved successfully include scheduling,timetabling,networkdesign,transportationanddistribution,vehicle routing, the travelling salesman problem, packing and cutting, satis?ability and general mixed integer programming. EvoCOP began in 2001 and has been held annually since then. It is the ?rst event speci?cally dedicated to the application of evolutionary computation and related methods to combinatorial optimization problems. Originally held as a workshop,EvoCOPbecameaconferencein2004.Theeventsgaveresearchersan excellent opportunity to present their latest research and to discuss current - velopments and applications.Following the general trend of hybrid metaheur- tics and diminishing boundaries between the di?erent classes of metaheuristics, EvoCOPhas broadenedits scope in recent years and invited submissions on any kind of metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization.