During the IMMM 2011 a tutorial on "System Identification and Data Mining with HeuristicLab" was held by Andreas Scheibenpflug and Michael Kommenda. In particular, they showed how to

• generally work with HeuristicLab
• setup and analyze large scale optimization experiments
• perform regression and classification analysis and
• avoid overfitting during the modeling phase.

The slides to this tutorial should be available on the conference homepage soon.

Andreas Beham recently had to run some large parameter experiments in HeuristicLab - and by large we mean about 400 configurations per experiment and more than 27,000 individual runs. The goal of this experiment was to test several parameter configurations on a number of problem instances in order to find the configuration that performed best in those instances.

Andreas shares his thoughts on the design of large parameter experiments and how you can make them as memory-friendly as possible on the HeuristicLab Blog. The blog entry also comes with a helpful code sample that should get you starte...

We are very happy to announce that two long-term HEAL affiliates from the Institute for Production and Logistics Management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz have successfully defended their PhD theses. The orals were scheduled back to back on Tuesday with many friends and colleagues in the audience. Their individual research areas were:

• Roland Braune: Job Shop Scheduling with Total Weighted Tardiness Objective: Enhancements to Local Search and Bottleneck-based Methods.
• Michael Bögl: Suchraumstrukturanalysen und selbstlernende nachbarschaftsbasierte Suchverfahren am zeitfensterbeschränkt...