3nd Special Session on Nature-Inspired Computation in Transport, Mobility and Logistics

We are very pleased to announce the organization of the 3nd Special Session on Nature-Inspired Computation in Transport, Mobility and Logistics on the upcoming 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2021). Nature-inspired optimization algorithms, especially those based on Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence, have been widely shown, over decades of intense research activity, to effectively address a diverse range of real-world optimization problems. Almost all engineering disciplines have so far harnessed the computational efficiency of these search techniques, from industrial production scheduling to resource allocation in telecommunication networks or energy dispatching in microgrids, among many others. Above all, the importance of nature-inspired optimization has been paramount in problems related to the design, implementation and operation of logistics, transportation assets and mobility services, with notable problems that have spanned streams of literature over the years (e.g. the vehicle routing problem, dial-a-ride problem, school routing problem, travelling salesman problem, pickup and delivery problem, and the like).

While technical advances in the algorithmic design of nature-inspired solvers have been reported at a growing pace, they still remain largely unexplored in regard to their application to optimization problems stemming from transportation, mobility and logistics. The potential of emerging nature-inspired computation areas to attain unprecedented levels of performance and optimality is an uncharted research niche, particularly for those gaining momentum in recent times, such as evolutionary multitasking and large-scale global optimization.

The above reasons stimulate our proposal to organize a CEC2021 Special Session on Nature-inspired Computation applied to optimization problems related to Transportation, Mobility and Logistics. The event aims at fostering discussion and debate among participants around the theoretical analysis, implementation details and case studies related to the application of nature-inspired optimization algorithms to problems related to the main topic of the Special Session, including navigation, vehicle routing, scheduling, crowd dynamics, car sharing/pooling, traffic data analysis and the like. Contributions dealing with similar problems in related domains will be also welcome (e.g. Robotics).

Only submissions with novel contributions with respect to the state of the art will be considered for inclusion in this session. Papers will be treated under the same criteria as regular conference papers. Interested researchers are invited to submit their unpublished work via the IEEE CEC 2021 submission system. Topics of interest include (not limited to):

• Ground-breaking advances on search methods in the fields of Transportation, Mobility and Logistics, with emphasis on algorithmic designs inspired by biological processes and behaviours observed in Nature, such as Particle Swarm Optimization, Bat Algorithm, Cuckoo Search, Ant Colony, Artificial Bee Colony, Coral Reefs Optimization and Firefly Algorithm.
• Experiences and results with nature-inspired optimization in real-world scenarios related to transportation, logistic, navigation and vehicle routing.
• Evolutionary Data Mining applied to Transportation, Mobility and Logistics, such as the configuration of prediction models for traffic forecasting or the discovery of typical trajectories with evolutionary clustering methods
• Hybridization of nature-inspired solvers with operators and local search methods that incorporate expert knowledge from Transportation, Mobility and Logistics.
• Parallel evolutionary heuristics and metaheuristics for navigation, logistics and routing optimization problems: Evolutionary Simulated Annealing, Multiple-population, Multiple-deme, Distributed, Island based, Coarse grained, Genetic Algorithms, Distributed Evolutionary Techniques, Cellular Evolutionary Algorithm, Hyper Heuristics…
• New paradigms in nature-inspired optimization applied to problems in Transportation, Mobility and Logistics, such as evolutionary multitasking, decision making in multiobjective optimization, dynamic multicriteria optimization, large-scale global optimization, optimization ensembles, …
• Integration of geo-spatial data sources for the definition of complex, innovative optimization problems, and their efficient solving via nature-inspired heuristics.
• Swarm Intelligence for distributed, autonomous guidance and decision making for autonomous vehicles, swarm robotics and decentralized scenarios in Transportation, Mobility and Logistics.

Organizers:

• Eneko Osaba, TECNALIA Research & Innovation, Spain (eneko.osaba@tecnalia.com).
• Xin-She Yang, Middlesex University London, UK.
• Javier Del Ser, TECNALIA Research & Innovation, Spain; University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain.
• Yuxin Zhao, Harbin Engineering University, China.

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: January 31, 2021
• Notification of acceptance: March 22, 2021
• Final Paper Submission and Early Registration: April 7, 2021
• IEEE CEC 2021, Krakóv, Poland: June 28- July 1, 2021

For further information, please, refer to the webpage of the conference.