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). ...

Fellow HEAL researcher Stephan Hutterer has just been announced as the winner of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge. The goal of the of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge was to develop accurate forecasting methods for electrical energy consumption profiles, based on four training data sets from smart-metering equipment. Stephan will present his approach and detailed results at GECCO 2012 in Philadelphia next Monday. The entire group congratulates Stephan on this achievement!

The first meeting of the EURO working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization (VeRoLog) takes place in Bologna, Italy this week. Stefan Vonolfen will represent our research group in the special session on dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems and present his paper "New measures for describing the structure of dynamic vehicle routing problems".

Meanwhile, fellow HEAL researcher Stephan Hutterer has returned from the 12th International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS 2012), which was organized by Istanbul Technical University. Stephan pre...