Scope of the Workshop

Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, or simulated annealing have been highly successful in various applications, both in combinatorial and numerical optimisation. In contrast to problem-specific randomized algorithms, they are designed to be general black-box optimizers.

Given such a scenario, proving that such algorithms satisfy certain performance guarantees remains a hard and widely open problem. Gaining a theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics is therefore an important task. Since these search heuristics are of a stochastic nature, there is a clear potential in applying techniques developed in the area of design and analysis of problem-specific randomized algorithms, in addition to the mathematical methods that are developed specifically to analyse randomized search heuristics.

Aim of the Workshop

The aim of this workshop is to stimulate interactions between people already working on these problems and those with a general background in natural computation or randomised algorithms or both. The primary focus lies on discussing recent ideas and detecting challenging topics for future work, rather than on the presention of final results.