Evolutionary 2011 - Evolutionary Computation Techniques for Constraint Handling

Evolutionary algorithms are often applied to difficult optimization problems where candidate solutions are subject to various constraints.

There is a large body of practical guidelines and theoretical results about evolutionary algorithms in the context of constrained optimization. Closely related is the subject of constraint programming where some solution satisfying all constraints is sought. In both contexts evolutionary computation techniques can be and are applied to solve hard problems. The workshop intends to provide a forum for current research in these areas. Algorithmic techniques, case studies, theoretical and empirical analyses are all welcome. While focusing on handling constraints we intend to provide a forum for discussion, therefore allowing generous time slots for each presentation and ample time for discussions.


Carlos Artemio Coello Coello

He received a BSc in Civil Engineering from the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas in Mexico in 1991 (graduating Summa Cum Laude). Then, he was awarded a scholarship from the Mexican government to pursue graduate studies in Computer Science at Tulane University (in the USA). He received a MSc and a PhD in Computer Science in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Dr. Coello has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Plymouth Engineering Design Centre (in England) and a Visiting Professor at DePauw University (in the USA). He is currently full professor at CINVESTAV-IPN in Mexico City, Mexico. He has published over 250 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conferences. He has also co-authored the book "Evolutionary Algorithms for Solving Multi-Objective Problems", which is now in its Second Edition (Springer, 2007) and has co-edited the book "Applications of Multi- Objective Evolutionary Algorithms" (World Scientific, 2004). He has delivered invited talks, keynote speeches andtutorials at international conferences held in Spain, USA, Canada, Switzerland, UK, Chile, Colombia, Brazil,Argentina, India, Uruguay and Mexico. Dr. Coello has served as a technical reviewer for over50 international journals and for more than 60 international conferences and actually serves as associate editor of the journals "IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation", "Evolutionary Computation", "Computational Optimization and Applications", "Pattern Analysis and Applications" and the "Journal of Heuristics". He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals "Soft Computing", "Engineering Optimization", the "Journal of Memetic Computing" and the "International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research". He received the 2007 National Research Award (granted by the Mexican Academy of Science) in the area of "exact sciences". He is member of the Mexican Academy of Science, Senior Member of the IEEE, and member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. His current research interests are: evolutionary multiobjective optimization and constraint-handling techniques for evolutionary algorithms.


Dara Curran

He received a BSc. in Information Technology from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2000. After spending some time in industry, he was awarded an Irish Research Council for Research Engineering and Technology scholarship to pursue a PhD, which he obtained from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2006. He is currently an Enterprise Ireland Principal Investigator. Prior to this he was a staff scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, an Enterprise Ireland Principal Investigator and an Irish Research Council for Research, Engineering and Technology Post-doctoral fellow. He has published over 35 research papers and co-organised the first workshop on Organisation, Cooperation and Emergence in Social Learning Agents at ECAL 2009. His research is focused on the application of learning models to evolutionary algorithms and the use of evolutionary computation for Artificial Life simulation.


Thomas Jansen

Born 1969, studied Computer Science at the University of Dortmund, Germany. He received his diploma (1996, summa cum laude) and Ph.D. (2000, summa cum laude) there. From September 2001 to August 2002 he stayed as a Post-Doc at Kenneth De Jong's EClab at the George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. He was Juniorprofessor for Computational Intelligence from September 2002 to February 2009 at the Technical University Dortmund. Since March 2009 he is Stokes Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at the University College Cork, Ireland. His research is centered around design and theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms and other randomized search heuristics. He has published 16 journal papers, 34 conference papers and contributed seven book chapters. He is associate editor of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), member of the steering committee of the Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics workshop series, was program chair at PPSN 2008, co-organized FOGA 2009, a workshop on Bridging Theory and Practice (PPSN 2008), two Dagstuhl workshops on Theory of Evolutionary Computation (2004 and 2006) and one Dagstuhl workshop on Artificial Immune Systems (2011).