Call for Papers CEC2015 Special Session "Fitness Landscape Analysis in Practice"

Special Session for IEEE CEC 2015.

Motivation

Since the notion of a fitness landscape was introduced by Sewell Wright in 1932, fitness landscapes have been studied by evolutionary biologists to better understand how evolution occurs in nature. In a similar way, researchers in evolutionary computation (EC) have used fitness landscapes to better understand the evolutionary process of search. Studies have ranged from theoretical models of fully enumerated combinatorial landscapes to the prediction of algorithm performance based on approximate fitness landscape characteristics. Fitness landscape analysis is a growing field in the EC community, but research has been scattered in widely different publications and conferences. Research papers in fitness landscapes are often incorporated into theoretical tracks of conferences, even when the research is focussed on the practical application of fitness landscape analysis. Alternatively, papers on fitness landscapes may appear alone in specific algorithm tracks, such as swarm intelligence or genetic programming.

This session is one of the two sessions at CEC 2015 dedicated to fitness landscapes analysis. Please visit the web page of the other session: Fitness Landscape Analysis and Search Space Structure which is more oriented on theoretical aspects. The aim of the two special sessions on fitness landscapes is to provide an opportunity to not only bring fitness landscape analysis researchers together at CEC 2015, but also to publish the most recent work in two dedicated tracks in the proceedings.

Scope

For this special session on fitness landscapes we invite researchers to submit unpublished work specifically focussing on the practice of fitness landscape analysis. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Analysis of algorithm performance in relation to fitness landscape characteristics
• Practical techniques for characterising the features of combinatorial problems with large search spaces or approximating the features of continuous search spaces
• Practical measures for characterising dynamic and co-dynamic landscapes
• Practical analysis of the fitness landscapes of constrained optimisation problems
• Online fitness landscape analysis for the characterisation of problems during search
• Analysis of benchmark problem suites using fitness landscape techniques
• Generating new benchmark problems with particular fitness landscape characteristics
• Analysis of the fitness landscapes of specific classes of problems or real-world optimisation problem instances to provide insight into algorithm behaviour or to highlight challenges in the practical application of fitness landscape analysis

Paper Submission

Papers submitted to the special session will be treated in the same way as regular papers submitted to CEC 2015 and will be included in the conference proceedings.

Papers should be prepared according to the format and page limit of regular papers specified for CEC 2015. Information on the paper format and templates can be found at:
http://sites.ieee.org/cec2015/cfp/.
When submitting your paper, be sure to select the special session name from the main research topic list.
Paper submission should be done through the CEC 2015 website by following the paper submission link: www.cec2015.org.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: December 19, 2014
Paper acceptance notification: February 20, 2015
Final paper submission deadline: March 13, 2015
Early registration: March 13, 2015
Conference dates: May 25-28, 2015

Organizers

Dr. Katherine Malan
Department of Computer Science
University of Pretoria
South Africa
http://www.cs.up.ac.za/~kmalan

Prof. Andries Engelbrecht
Department of Computer Science
University of Pretoria
South Africa
http://www.cs.up.ac.za/~engel