Call for Papers WCCI 2016 Special Session: Evolutionary Bilevel Optimization

http://www.bilevel.org

Organizers:

Name: Dr. Ankur Sinha
            Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb
Affiliation: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
                    Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Aim and Scope:

Bilevel optimization problems are special kind of optimization problems that involve two levels of optimization, namely upper level and lower level. The hierarchical structure of the problem requires that every feasible solution to the upper level problem should satisfy the optimality conditions of the lower level problem. Such a requirement makes bilevel optimization problems difficult to solve. These problems are commonly found in many practical problem solving tasks, which include optimal control, process optimization, game-playing strategy development, transportation problems, coordination of multi-divisional firms, machine learning and others. Due to the computation expense and other difficulties involved in handling such problems, they are often handled using approximate solution procedures. There is a need for theoretical as well as methodological advancements to handle such problems efficiently.

IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) being one of the leading conferences in evolutionary computation will give an opportunity to researchers and practitioners to discuss and exchange ideas for handling bilevel problems, which have yet not been widely explored by the evolutionary computation community. The special session on Bilevel Optimization will bring together researchers working on the following topics:

• Evolutionary algorithms for bilevel optimization problems
• Evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective bilevel optimization problems
• Approximate procedures to handle bilevel optimization problems
• Hybrid approaches to handle bilevel optimization problems
• Theoretical results on bilevel optimization problems
• Bilevel Application Problems
• Hierarchical decision making

Keywords

Bilevel Optimization, Bilevel Multi-objective Optimization, Evolutionary Algorithms, Multi-Criteria Decision Making, Theory on Bilevel Programming, Hierarchical Decision Making, Bilevel Applications, Hybrid Algorithms

Short Biography

Ankur Sinha is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India in the area of Production and Quantitative Methods. He completed his Ph.D. from Aalto University School of Business, Finland, where his dissertation was adjudged as the best thesis for the year 2011. After completing his PhD he has been a visiting scholar at the Michigan State University, MI USA. He has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. His research interests are in the areas of Bilevel Optimization, Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms and Multi-Criteria Decision Making. He has published his research in some of the leading Computer Science, Business and Statistics journals. He has been a co-chair of the track on Evolutionary Bilevel Optimization at CEC 2012, 2013 and 2015. He has also offered tutorials on Evolutionary Bilevel Optimization at GECCO 2013, PPSN 2014 and CEC 2015. Furthermore, he has chaired sessions on other topics and has been active as a program committee member in the evolutionary computation conferences. More information about his research can be found on his website http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~asinha/.


Kalyanmoy Deb is a Koenig Endowed Chair Professor at the Michigan State University in Michigan USA. He is the recipient of the prestigious TWAS Prize in Engineering Science, Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences for the year 2005. He has also received the ‘Thomson Citation Laureate Award’ from Thompson Scientific for having highest number of citations in Computer Science during the past ten years in India. He is a fellow of IEEE, Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Indian National Academy of Sciences, and International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC). He has received Fredrick Wilhelm Bessel Research award from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2003. His main research interests are in the area of computational optimization, modeling and design, and evolutionary algorithms. He has written two textbooks on optimization and more than 325 international journal and conference research papers. He has pioneered and is a leader in the field of evolutionary multi-objective optimization. He is associate editor and in the editorial board of a number of major international journals. More information about his research can be found from http://www.egr.msu.edu/people/profile/kdeb