Yesterday, we published a new course titled "Metaheuristic Optimization". On the course website, you can find all slides and example algorithm implementations and you can download the complete course material as a single tar.xz archive (can be opened under Windows and Linux) from here. As the third completely published course of our institute, after the courses on "Object-Oriented Programming with Java" and "Distributed Computing", this marks another milestone in our strive for teaching excellence.
The new course tries to give a complete and yet in-depth overview on the topic of optimization from the perspective of metaheuristics, i.e., approximate algorithms that can find good solutions for computational hard problems within a short time. The course is designed to require little background knowledge. Many of the presented algorithms can directly be implemented during the course in Java by the instructor within a few minutes. This shows that the algorithms we discuss are not scary and can be mastered even with basic programming knowledge. It also closes the gap between research and practice – after all, we are the Institute of Applied Optimization.
In the course, we discuss a broad spectrum of different optimization methods, ranging from local search algorithms such as hill climbers, Simulated Annealing, and Tabu Search to global search methods such as Evolutionary Algorithms, Evolution Strategies, Genetic Programming, Differential Evolution, Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization, and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms. We also discuss several phenomena that make problems difficult for these algorithms as well as general concepts such as multi-objective and constraint optimization as well as several example applications. All in all, this course aims to give the student the knowledge to recognize an optimization problem when she sees it, the ability to choose the right algorithm for the right problem, together with the practical experience to implement and apply said algorithm in a short time.