Last week HEAL researcher Monika Kofler traveled to Smolenice, Slovakia to attend the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics (LINDI 2012) and present her work on the optimization of steel slab logistics. The first incarnation of LINDI took place in Wildau, Germany (2007) followed by Linz, Austria (2009) and Budapest, Hungary (2011). Once again, it was a stimulating and very international event with researchers from Europe, Thailand, Canada and the U.S., who we hope to see again in Wildau in 2013.

The University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria consists of four faculties located in Hagenberg, Linz, Steyr and Wels, which specialize in informatics, social sciences, management and engineering, respectively. Although the different faculties have cooperated successfully for years, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the latest research endeavors of the four centers. We all thought it was high time for a bilateral update. Therefore, researchers from Steyr and Hagenberg spent the last two days in workshops, jokingly called "boot camps". Yesterday our colleagues from Logistikum Steyr gave exc...

Most members of the HeuristicLab development team are currently attending GECCO 2012 in Philadelphia. However, before leaving we finalized the HeuristicLab 3.3.7 release, packed with new features for benchmark testing, parameter variation experiments and much more. One of the core incentives for this latest release was that it is still very cumbersome to find suitable parameter settings for a particular problem instance and algorithm. We therefore started to collect algorithm parameters and results of executed test-runs in a systematical way in the so-called optimization knowledge base (OKB). ...