SPECIALSESSIONSINDUSTRY-STANDARD EC APPLICATIONS:SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES
Kalyanmoy Deb, Jeffrey Abell and Debejyo Chakraborty

Evolutionary Computation (EC) methods have been suggested and applied for more than
three decades by now. From their basic suggested methods involving binary encodings
leading to a simple genetic algorithm, many new and advanced evolutionary algorithms areproposed. They have been applied to many difficult problems in practice, commercializedwith dedicated softwares, and proliferated to a number of different fields including softwareengineering, manufacturing, design, bioinformatics, service industries, games, artificial
intelligence and machine learning problems. While the development of new and advanced
methods will continue to get more and more attention from academic researchers, it issomewhat worrisome that EC methods are not yet fully embraced to any reasonable extent
by industries in their routine day-to-day tasks. It is in this background we propose to arrange
a special session during the upcoming CEC-2017 conference focussing on the success andchallenges of EC methodologies in addressing real-world problems from industries.
The first organizer has 29 years of experience in developing generic EC methods, some ofwhich are now used as default in single and multi-criterion optimization, and has 25 years ofexperience working with industries in applying EC methods in various industrial problems.
The second and third organizers come from a leading automotive industry and have many
years of research experience in design optimization, manufacturing and project executionalaspects. They all are well connected with other leading industries who are either alreadyusing EC methods or are finding EC methods to be potential for an adoption. Besides
academic researchers, the organizers plan to pursue and motivate various industrial
researchers to submit papers related to the success of their EC adoption and discusschallenges offered by their problems to existing search and optimization algorithms. This
special session will provide a platform for industrial researchers to showcase their EC successand simultaneously discuss challenges they exhibit requiring special research efforts. Thus,
this special session plans to bring together researchers and practitioners (hopefully, in equalproportion) working on any aspects of practicalities observed in routine real-world problems.
Since the special session focuses on real-world problem solving, a good balance of
academic and industrial participation will be maintained. While successful EC case studies
will provide valuable information to the participants, challenging unsolved problems should

Special Session Chair
Ke Tang · ketang@ustc.edu.chn

IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation
Donostia – San Sebastián, June 8-5
www.cec2017.org · info@cec2017.org

SPECIALSESSIONS

also give academic researchers new areas to venture. The special session will also include apanel discussion between authors, participants and a few invited experts summarizing
current status and future efforts needed to motivate more industrial adoption of ECmethods.

Topics•

Large-scale (variables, constraints, and objectives) search and optimization problems•

Miniscule feasible search space•

Mixed discrete-continuous search space•

Expensive evaluation procedure•

Uncertainty in variables and parameters•

Noise in objective and constraint evaluations•

Deep linkage among variables•

Limited computational budget

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