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.

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...