Riga Technical University is a long-term scientific partner of our group. So far, two PhD students from Latvia have visited us in Hagenberg: Tatjana Lagzdina in 2008 and Vitaly Bolshakov in the summer of 2011.

During his stay in Austria, Vitaly and Erik Pitzer indentified a common research interests in the area of fitness landscape analysis, which led to a joint publication on vehicle scheduling problems. Due to the positive and fruitful collaboration, Erik is currently staying in Riga for a reciprocal visit. This time, they will tackle the vehicle routing problem and perform a rigorous fitnes...

HEAL memeber Stefan Vonolfen went to Graz to attend the 2nd Workshop on Young Academics' Management Science last weekend. The workshop is organized each year by Dr. Peter Greistorfer and Dr. Marc Reimann from the University of Graz with the aim to encourage networking between young post-docs and grad students in the fields of metaheuristics and operations research. Stefan presented some recent research results in his paper "An Online Genetic Algorithm for Solving Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problems".

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.