Past Events

This is the list of the events already organized by the members of the JRL.

The 3rd International Conference on the Harmony Search Algorithm

The 3rd International Conference on the Harmony Search Algorithm (ICHSA 2017) held in Bilbao (Bizkaia, Basque Country, Spain), a beautiful venue internationally recognized for business, trading and its devotion to first-level R&D, as buttressed by more than two hundred technology-based companies and R&D centers established in the region. ICHSA 2017 targeted information exchange and cross-fertilization among academia, research centers and industry. The 2017 edition of this international event spaned beyond the development, design and applications of naive, variants, and hybrid methods of the Harmony Search Algorithm: prospective authors are encouraged to present their latest achievements around Computational Intelligence, with particular emphasis on innovative bio-inspired optimization methods (Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Intelligence) and their applicability to exploratory data analysis, predictive modeling and optimization.

Topics of interest included the following:

• Analytical convergence studies of meta-heuristics
• Theoretical foundations of meta-heuristics
• Improved variants of the HS algorithm
• Hybridizations of HS and other avant-garde meta-heuristic solvers (e.g. FA, CS, BA)
• Parallel and distributed computing implementations of bio-inspired optimization schemes over Big Data architectures
• Examples of the application of meta-heuristics to data mining (including Deep Learning models)
• Applications of bio-inspired optimization algorithms to different sectors

Published book: Heuristics and Hyper-Heuristics – Principles and Applications

In the last few years, the society is witnessing ever-growing levels of complexity in the optimization paradigms lying at the core of different applications and processes. This augmented complexity has motivated the adoption of heuristic methods as a means to balance the Pareto trade-off between computational efficiency and the quality of the produced solutions to the problem at hand. The momentum gained by heuristics in practical applications spans further towards hyper-heuristics, which allow constructing ensembles of simple heuristics to handle efficiently several problems of a single class. In this context, this short book compiles selected applications of heuristics and hyper-heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems, including scheduling and other assorted application scenarios.

CEC 2017 Special Session on Nature Inspired Computation in Navigation and Vehicle Routing

Nature-inspired computation and its relevant algorithms, especially those based on swarm intelligence, have become effective in recent years in solving a diverse range of optimization problems in real-world applications, from engineering optimization to scheduling and from vehicle routing to asymmetric travelling salesman problems. This special session provided a platform for presenting state-of-the-art developments in this area, with an emphasis on the applications in navigation and vehicle routing. This CEC2017 Special Session enabled researchers to discuss theoretical analysis of nature-inspired optimization algorithms, algorithm implementation and case studies in navigation, robotics, vehicle routing, scheduling, engineering optimization and industrial applications.