Senior Lecturer Dr. Markus Wagner from the Optimisation and Logistics Group of the School of Computer Science of The University of Adelaide, SA, Australia presented the research talk "Approximation-Guided Many-Objective Optimisation and the Travelling Thief Problem" on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 from 08:40 to 09:30 in Anhui University (AHU) [安徽大学], Conference Hall on the First Floor below of the Xingzhi Building [安徽大学磬苑校区行知楼负一楼报告厅] at the Symposium on Evolutionary Computation [进化计算领域专家系列学术报告会] under the organization of Professors Xingyi Zhang (Anhui University) and Bin Li (USTC) for the IEEE CIS Hefei Chapter. The talk is followed by the talks "Automating Scientific Research in Optimization" by Prof. Weise and "Species-based PSO for Continuous Dynamic Constrained Optimization" by Associate Prof. Dr. Wenjian Luo (USTC). The audiences of all presented talks were quite big and interesting discussions ensued. [poster, slides]
Abstract
The members of the Optimisation and Logistics Group in Adelaide research optimisation methods that are frequently used to solve hard and complex optimization problems. These include linear programming, branch and bound, genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, genetic programming, ant colony optimisation, local search, and others.
My areas of interest are heuristic optimisation and applications thereof. My work draws on computational complexity analysis and on performance landscape analysis. In this seminar, I will focus on two topics:
- Most real-world optimisation problems are characterised by multiple objectives, which are often in conflict with each other. The goal of multi-objective optimisation is to find a (not too large) representative subset. However, navigating high-dimensional objective spaces is hard. I will first show how the theoretical concept of "approximation" allowed us in 2011 to be the first who could reliably deal with more than five objectives. Then, I will briefly outline a few of the multi-objective problems that we have been working on since then.
- The so-called Travelling Thief Problem is an academic problem that was created to study problems with interconnected components. Such components are present in integrated planning and scheduling decision-support systems, for example in supply-chain operations.
Markus made the slides available on his website at http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~markus/pub/171025ahu.pdf. He is grateful for the support of China Science and Technology Exchange Center (CSTEC) [中国科学技术交流中心], the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), and for the support of Profs. Bin Li (USTC), Xingyi Zhang (Anhui University), and Thomas Weise (IAO).
Short Biography
Dr. Markus Wagner is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide, Australia. He has done his PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany and at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research topics range from mathematical runtime analysis of heuristic optimization algorithms and theory-guided algorithm design to applications of heuristic methods to renewable energy production, professional team cycling and software engineering. So far, he has been a program committee member 30 times, and he has written over 70 articles with over 70 different co-authors. He has chaired several education-related committees within the IEEE CIS, is Co-Chair of ACALCI 2017 and General Chair of ACALCI 2018. Dr. Wagner is also a co-chair of our International Workshop on Benchmarking of Computational Intelligence Algorithms (BOCIA) and a co-guest editor of the Special Issue on Benchmarking of Computational Intelligence Algorithms in the Computational Intelligence Journal with Profs. Thomas Weise, Bin Li (USTC), Xingyi Zhang (Anhui University), and Jörg Lässig (University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz).
