HeuristicLab

May 21th, 2010

We are moving! The Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL) has a shiny new home page. For more current information about the research group (and in particular, an up-to-date list of publications) please visit heal.heuristiclab.com from now on. Our optimization framework HeuristicLab will also get a new development homepage and blog to celebrate the release of HeuristicLab 3.3. The old homepage will go offline in the next couple of weeks, as soon as all the content has been migrated.

April 18th, 2010

We are proud to annouce that team HEAL made first place in the symbolic regression competition and second place in the financial time series prediction competition in the EvoCompetitions side event of Evo*2010. To generate the models for the competitions we used a pre-release candidate of HeuristicLab which also includes plugins for genetic programming. The results show that HeuristicLab is powerful and flexible enough to achieve competitive results for real world applications with minimal preparation effort.

January 15th, 2010

The HeuristicLab development team is proud to announce the next expansion of the research group. Stefan Vonolfen is joining the team to work on projects in the field of logistic optimization. He has contributed to the upcoming HeuristicLab 3 and is eager to continue working with us. We are very glad to have him on board.

January 11th, 2010

The book review of Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications, which was published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM), is now online at our book's website. We would like to thank Springer Science+Business Media, Prof. Langdon, and Prof. Spector (editor of GPEM), as well as the reviewer herself, Prof. Pappa, for granting us permission to display the review on our site.

January 2nd, 2010

The HeuristicLab team would like to wish everyone a happy new year! By the end of this month we will be starting to release the next major version of HeuristicLab on this website and looking forward to hear about your experience in using HeuristicLab for teaching and about your innovative research results! We would be glad to get to know our users and the great things they are doing with HeuristicLab.

December 16th, 2009

voestalpine Stahl GmbH invited the Heureka! project consortium to Linz for a retrospection on the first year of the centre. The meeting commenced at 3:00 p.m. with an exciting tour of the voestalpine Stahlwelt exhibition, followed by presentations and a buffet. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

Research group head Michael Affenzeller summarized accomplishments of the first year and introduced the research branches.
Gabriel Kronberger presented new approaches for the evaluation of complex process models.
Stephan Winkler showed intermediate results on the analysis of medical data from clinical laboratory testing.
Finally, Monika Kofler gave an update on the progress in facility layout and warehouse optimization.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank voestalpine for hosting the meeting and all attendees for their interest and insightful comments! Below are several pictures from the event.

December 15th, 2009

Heureka researcher Andreas Beham is attending the Winter Simulation Conference 2009 in Austin, Texas this week. The Winter Simulation Conference is among the premier international conferences on system simulation and Andreas is using the opportunity to network with other researchers and to present recent research results on facility layout optimization .

December 10th, 2009

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that two prizes went to our research team this year: Michael Affenzeller was awared first place in the category Researcher of the Year and Stefan Wagner received the Junior Researcher Award 2009 for their contributions to the field of heuristic and evolutionary optimization. Congratulations!

December 1st, 2009

A review of our book ("Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications") has been published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. The reviewer, Gisele L. Pappa from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, points out that the book covers the basics of GA and GP for optimization and presents results of interesting research on new methods capable of preserving relevant building blocks; she also describes it as a good buy for students and researchers interested in genetic algorithms and their application in optimization problems! The full review is available online at SpringerLink.

November 18th, 2009

The Austrian newspaper OÖ Nachrichten regularly introduces people in technical professions as part of their feature series 'Traumberuf Technik'. Our colleague Monika Kofler was interviewed about her research and gender roles in computer science. Read the full article (in German).

September 25th, 2009

Michael Affenzeller is presenting the Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization Heureka! at the annual ÖGM Meeting in Graz, Austria.

September 23rd, 2009

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Heuristic Modeling of the Mental Progress of Persons with Normal Brain Aging, Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Disorders at the 21st European Modeling und Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2009). The work presented is a joint contribution between Stephan Winkler and Michael Affenzeller from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria, Stefanie Auer and Yvonne Donabauer from the M·A·S Alzheimerhilfe, Bad Ischl, Austria and Barry Reisberg from the Department of Psychiatry of the New York University Langone Medical Center, NY, USA.

The next international workshop on nature inspired distributed computing (NIDISC'2010) is being held during the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from April 19-23, 2010. The workshop covers the following topics:

Nature-inspired methods (e.g. ant colonies, GAs, cellular automata, DNA and molecular computing, local search, etc) for problem solving environments.
Parallel and distributed metaheuristics techniques (algorithms, technologies and tools).
Applications combining traditional parallel and distributed computing and optimization techniques as well as theoretical issues (convergence, complexity, etc).
Other algorithms and applications relating the above mentioned research areas.

Interested researchers should refer to the NIDISC website and submit their contributions until December, 4th 2009.

September 17th, 2009

The KIRAS research project Emergency Mission Control Center (EMC²) has ended successfully. The project's aim was to research on information technology support for fire fighting crews that allows for effective cooperation, information discovery and sharing. A prototype application has been built and was tested successfully in a simulated emergency scenario in a motorway tunnel near Wels, Upper Austria. The project partners were ROSENBAUER International AG, FH OÖ Forschungs & Entwicklungs GmbH, mobilkom austria AG, Österreichischer Bundesfeuerwehrverband and SIEMENS IT Solutions and Services GmbH. Project leader at the FH OÖ was Stefan Wagner. The project was funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The prototype and live streams from the simulated emergency scenario were presented in a big event at Rosenbauer's headquarters in Leonding, Austria.

Source: ROSENBAUER International AG

September 10-11, 2009

The LINDI 2009 conference is taking place in Linz. The conference deals with topics in the field of logistics and industrial informatics and is organized by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. The proceedings are published by IEEE.

September 1st, 2009

We are proud to announce that, as of this month, Stefan Wagner started his professorship for Complex Software Systems at the Department of Software Engineering at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, School of Informatics, Commnications and Media, Campus Hagenberg. Stefan is one of the founding members of this research group and father of the software environment HeuristicLab. The whole team congratulates wholehearted!

July 25th, 2009

Two research projects, proposed by HEAL in cooperation with the School of Management (FH OÖ, Campus Steyr), have been accepted: "TSCHECHOW" and "COVER.core". In TSCHECHOW, opinion mining and bioinformatical text mining shall be researched; research in cost-efficient vehicle routing with constraint relaxation shall be conducted in COVER.core. Both research projects will be funded by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and the Government of Upper Austria; in each of these projects two research assistants will be employed for approximately one and a half years: one in Steyr, one in Hagenberg working with HEAL members. Thus, we expect the HEAL team to grow by two members within the next months!

June 17th, 2009

On June 25th, 2009, Professor Dr. Enrique Alba will give a talk at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg, entitled "Metaheuristics for Bioinformatics: Gene Selection and Genomics". In this talk Prof. Alba, Professor for informatics at the University of Málaga and expert in parallel metaheuristic algorithms, will explain the use of metaheuristics in bioinformatics. In bioinformatics, metaheuristics are used for solving various kinds of problems in research with genomics and gene interaction, for example. Basic and current research results in this area shall be presented and discussed by Prof. Alba.

June 7th, 2009

We are proude to announce that an article written by members of the HeuristicLab team has been published in Springer's journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM). The paper "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, and Stefan Wagner has appeared in GPEM, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 111-140; this article can be retrieved online via Springer's online portal.

May 8th, 2009

Coming back from the presentation and conferment of the Microsoft Innovation Award 09 we are happy to announce that we have received the 2nd price! Among a total of 64 submitted projects HeuristicLab was perceived as one of the three most innovative software projects by both an expert jury and a public audience. We are of course very happy about such a recognition and the award itself, which was presented by Austria's Federal Minister for Science and Research Dr. Johannes Hahn.

During the event we were able to show HeuristicLab to interested people and talk about its possibilities and applications. Below you can find pictures of the conferment and the event and a video where research group head Michael Affenzeller talks about HeuristicLab (german).

Microsoft Innovation Award 2009 Preisträger

May 7th, 2009

Hoooooray! We are very happy to announce that there is a new doctor among us: Dr. Stefan Wagner, chief architect of the HeuristicLab optimization framework, has successfully defended his thesis titled Heuristic Optimization Software Systems - Modeling of Heuristic Optimization Algorithms in the HeuristicLab Software Environment and has received the title Doctor Technicae from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. In his presentation he compared existing software systems and showed the concepts that went into the development of the next generation HeuristicLab which we are going to release early next year to the public. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

At the same day, fellow researcher Prof. Günther Raidl from the Algorithm and Data structures group from the Vienna University of Technology gave a talk on metaheuristic hybridization at the FH OÖ's campus Hagenberg. Prof. Raidl showed interesting ways to combine metaheuristics and exact methods and presented two applications on which this combination has been very successful. His presentation can be found in the presentations section.

April 24, 2009

Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications

We are proud to make another big announcement! Our book Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications has finally been printed and is available for purchase. On more than 360 pages the book treats the topic of GA theory, GP theory, and describes the concept of offspring selection as a problem-independent enhancement to the performance. On the example of several problem situations the performances are compared and analysed. Finally several applications are described along with results. More details, such as the table of contents as well as several videos regarding the analysis of genetic diversity can be found on the accompanying website.

April 23, 2009

We have received further updates from Microsoft regarding the Innovation Award 2009 and were informed that HeuristicLab is among the finalists that are to be presented at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Vienna! So, we will be there on May 7th in a whole-day event where we are going to show the project and talk about applications, technology, and backgrounds. We hope that you meet us there!

April 16, 2009

Hooray! We are proud to announce that HeuristicLab is on the shortlist of 12 finalists competing for Microsoft's Innovation Award 2009. From 64 submissions 12 projects have been selected of which a jury will further select and create a ranking.

April 15, 2009

Gabriel Kronberger is currently attending the EuroGP conference in Tübingen, Germany presenting his study "On Crossover Success Rate in Genetic Programming with Offspring Selection".
The EuroGP continues from today until Friday, April 17th 2009.

April 9, 2009

Our colleague Stephan Winkler is going to represent our research group on heuristic and evolutionary optimization at two conferences in the near future: At the Science Symposium of the Austrian Universities for Applied Sciences 2009 in Villach, Carinthia, he is going to present the paper "Analyse von Patientendaten und Evolutionäres Design von Virtuellen Sensoren für Erkrankungen" ("Analysis of Medical Data of Patients and the Design of Virtual Ssensors for Diseases"), and at the International Workshop on Nature Inspired Distributed Computing (organized within the 23rd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Rome, Italy) he is going to present the paper "Fine Grained Population Diversity Analysis for Parallel Genetic Programming".

Mar 26, 2009

We are proud to welcome another official member to the Heureka/HeuristicLab team. Erik Pitzer has already been an active developer on the 2nd iteration of the HeuristicLab architecture, but took the chance to go to Harvard Medical School in the mean time. He is now back and working on structure identification problems within Heureka as well as working actively on the next version of the HeuristicLab architecture, which is scheduled for release in the beginning of next year.

Mar 13, 2009

Members of the Heureka Team talked to students about their research and education work during the annual open day in Hagenberg. Interested people were introduced into the world of heuristic optimization. We talked a lot about the importance and the inspiration that comes from nature for deriving new optimization techniques as well as giving an overview of the range of applications from route planning, to schedule optimization and system identification.

Feb 18, 2009

The EuroCAST 2009 conference and the workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving provided a good base for exchang between the group of Günther Raidl and the HeuristicLab team around Michael Affenzeller. Here are some pictures of the workshop and an informal meeting.

Feb 16-20, 2009

Members of the HeuristicLab development team are attending the EuroCAST 2009 conference to present recent research results as well as get in touch with people willing to participate in the HeuristicLab project. We would also like to remind everyone of the LINDI 2009 conference in Linz later this year.

Feb 1, 2009

Hooray! Our colleague and long term HeuristicLab developer Stephan Winkler is, as of today, officially professor at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. After a well received PhD thesis and several years of hard work, he is now going to face many new challenges in both education and research at the department of Medical and Bioinformatics in Hagenberg. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly and wishes him all the best and a lot of success for his plans!

Jan 16, 2009

Michael Affenzeller is one of the program chairs of the upcoming 2nd International Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics (LINDI 2009). The conference will take place in Linz, Austria from Septemer 10-12, 2009. Interested people are invited to send contributions. The deadline of full paper submissions is April 30, 2009. More information can be found in the call for papers as well as on the official homepage. It is also a good chance to visit Linz, especially as it is the european culture capital of 2009 (along with Vilnius, Lithuania).

Dec 31, 2008

The HeuristicLab development team wishes everyone a successful and happy new year 2009! We're glad about the worldwide interest in our software and hope that you're on board with us the coming year. The next chance to meet with members of the team is at the EuroCAST 2009 conference in Gran Canaria, Spain from February 15-20. We are there co-organizing a workshop on heuristic problem solving together with the group of Günther Raidl from the University of Vienna.

Dec 18, 2008

Stephan Winkler today received the Junior Researcher Award 2008 from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ). He was given the prize in recognition of his excellent research work, presented in his PhD thesis and more than 30 peer reviewed publications over the course of the last 4 years! The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

Dec 17, 2008

The article "Evolutionary Systems Identification: New Algorithmic Concepts and Applications" by HEAL members Michael Affenzeller, Stephan Winkler, and Stefan Wagner has been bublished in the book Advances in Evolutionary Algorithms. This book, edited by Xiong Zhihui and published by IN-TECH Education and Publishing, can be downloaded here.

Dec 8, 2008

Members of the HeuristicLab team will be attending the EuroCAST'09 Workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving and present some of their research studies there. EuroCAST'09 is the 12th international conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory and will take place from February 15-20 in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain. Interested people are invited to join us there!

Oct 23, 2008

The Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! has been officially opened in a ceremony at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg. There were a number of interesting talks and people from the industry, science and politics later gathered at the buffet. Please find below several pictures of the opening ceremony.

Oct 1, 2008

We are proud to announce that the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! a research laboratory at the FH-OÖ officially started today. The website can be found at heureka.heuristiclab.com and explains the mission and background of this lab, research plans and our partners. Josef Ressel-Centres are an equivalent to the well-known Christian Doppler laboratories, but specifically adjusted to aid the development of the Austrian Universities of Applied Scienes. They are funded partly by an industry consortium, partly by the FH-OÖ and partly by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).

Oct 1, 2008

The HeuristicLab development team is proud to announce that Michael Kommenda joined today. He will reinforce the research group and study in the field of structure identification, working on some of the projects defined in the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA!

Sep 30, 2008

The HeuristicLab development team welcomes a visiting PhD student from the university of Riga, Latvia! Tatjana Lagzdina will stay here for the next three months investigating the application of robust optimization techniques to simulation-based optimization tasks.

Aug-Sep, 2008

Stefan Wagner is staying in Sydney, Australia as guest professor. He will give some talks at the University of Technology, Sydney, as well as meet with Zenon Chaczko, a renowned software engineer and professor at the university.

Aug 25, 2008

The article AbYSS: Adapting Scatter Search to Multiobjective Optimization has been published in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Volume 12 Issue 4 2008. It is a joint contribution of Antonio Nebro, Francisco Luna, Enrique Alba, Bernabé Dorronsoro, Juan Durillo from the University of Málaga and our Andreas Beham. The reference can be found, e.g. on the publication page.

July 18, 2008

Stephan Winkler attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008) in Atlanta, Georgia, this week to present his contribution Fine-Grained Population Diversity Estimation for Genetic Programming Based Structure Identification (which is available as poster [pdf, 3.2 MB]).

July 18, 2008

Our colleague Gabriel Kronberger is currently in Hamburg, Germany, to present the paper On the Effects of Enhanced Selection Models on Quality and Comparability of Classifiers Produced by Genetic Programming at the 32nd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl 2008).

July 8, 2008

The HeuristicLab development team proudly announces that our joint proposal for a Josef Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization (Heureka!) has been accepted for funding by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). Heureka! is among the three first research laboratories for universities of applied sciences in Austria and will start in fall 2008.

June 19, 2008

The paper A Comparative Study of Genetic Algorithm Components in Simulation-Based Optimisation, a joint contribution of Birkan Can and Cathal Heavey from the University of Limerick, IE and our Andreas Beham has been accepted to be presented at the upcoming Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'08) this December.

June 18, 2008

Presentations of the last HEAL meeting on June 11th have been added to the presentations section. The topics this time cover the fields of evolutionary art and software parallelization.

June 2, 2008

Stephan Winkler is attending the Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference (CHAOS 2008) to present his contribution On the Reliability of Nonlinear Modeling Using Enhanced Genetic Programming Techniques.

May 21, 2008

Members of the HeuristicLab development team are going to present their recent studies on the 20th European Modeling and Simulation Symposium in Briatico, Italy in September 2008. Accepted contributions can be seen on the publications page.

Apr 21, 2008

The HeuristicLab development team welcomes a new PhD!
Dr. Stephan Winkler has today successfully defended his PhD thesis Evolutionary System Identification - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications and receives the title Doktor der Technischen Wissenschaften (Doctor Technicae) from the Johannes Kepler University Linz. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this achievement!

Apr 19, 2008

Michael Affenzeller is attending the OEGOR/GOR meeting Entscheidungsunterstützung in der Logistik - Geographische Informationssysteme, Simulation und Optimierung in Salzburg presenting our latest efforts to combine HeuristicLab 3.0 with simulation for general, user-friendly and fully customizable simulation optimization tasks.

Apr 14, 2008

Andreas Beham is attending the 11th NIDISC workshop at the IPDSP'2008 with his contribution titled A Genetic Programming Approach to solve Scheduling Problems with Parallel Simulation.

Mar 13, 2008

Birkan Can and Cathal Heavey from the University of Limerick, Ireland are presenting a collaborative work with Andreas Beham on the Buffer Allocation Problem at the Operational Research Society, 4th Simulation Workshop (SW08) in Worcestershire, England. The titel of the contribution is called Simulation-based Evolutionary Optimisation of Buffer Allocation Problem.
The work is based on HeuristicLab 1.1 and can be found here.

Mar 11, 2008

The About HeuristicLab section has been updated with information about HeuristicLab 3.0.

Mar 10, 2008

The news page is available as RSS feed as well. Point your RSS reader to http://www.heuristiclab.com/rss.xml to make all the news available directly in your favourite news reader.

Feb 6, 2008

Stephan Winkler's paper On the Reliability of Nonlinear Modeling Using Enhanced Genetic Programming Techniques has been accepted to be presented at the Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference (CHAOS 2008) in Chania, Greece.

Feb 1, 2008

The Presentations section is updated with new presentations from the last HEAL meetings. There is a lot of insight into the operation of the next evolutionary step in our optimization environment HeuristicLab 3.0 as well as a first interesting Bioinformatic application regarding the topic of protein folding!

Jan 31, 2008

Andreas Beham's paper A Genetic Programming Approach to Solve Scheduling Problems with Parallel Simulation has been accepted to be presented at the 11th NIDISC international workshop during the IPDPS'2008 conference in Miami, FL, United States.

Jan. 28, 2008

During the 20th European Modeling and Simulation Symposium (EMSS2008) a workshop on Soft Computing and Modelling & Simulation is organized by Witold Jacak and Michael Affenzeller from the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences.The goal of the workshop is to bring together academics from the fields of modeling and simulation with experts from the fields of soft computing and computational intelligence as well as practitioners interested in potential applications arising out of this context.

Dec. 5, 2007

Monika Kofler received the Würdigungspreis des Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung in recognition of her excellent diploma thesis titled Lowcost 3D Ultrasound in Vienna. The prize was presented by Austria's minister for science and research Dr. Johannes Hahn. Monika's advisor Dr. Werner Backfrieder joined the congratulations.
The whole HeuristicLab Development Team congratulates wholeheartedly to this success!

Nov. 19, 2007

Michael Affenzeller and Stephan Winkler are going to attend the Austrian Workshop on Metaheuristics 5 (AWM 5 '07). The event will take place on November 27th, 2007 at the Faculty of Social and Economical Sciences at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria; the presentations to be given can be found in the presentations section.

Nov. 09, 2007

The presentations given at the HEAL Meeting on November, 7th 2007 at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria are online. Head over to the presentations section and have a look at the topics and slides.

Oct. 08, 2007

The project Heuristische Produktionsfeinplanung in komplexen volatilen Systemen (HPF) has been officially started in Rankweil, Vorarlberg. From the HeuristicLab team Andreas Beham is working on the project which treats the topic of production planning in volatile systems. The project aims at finding an approach that takes benefit of both scheduling and dispatching during the detailed planning process. The project is funded by the Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH.

Oct. 01, 2007

Gabriel Kronberger has started working on the project Cooperative Evolutionary Data Mining Agents (CEDMA). The goal of this research project is to implement a multi agent system for collaborative data mining applications using Genetic Programming (GP). Within this project it is not only of interest to use the GP approach to retrieve a number of models for one target variable, but to find a large number of correlations between almost all of the variables in the data. These correlations are then supported by both simpler and more complex models at the same time, essentially creating and automatically maintaining a knowledge base on the basis of the investigated data. The project is funded by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences.

Aug. 08, 2007

The section About HeuristicLab contains new information and presents an insight into the developments and results of HeuristicLab 2.0.

July 12, 2007

The paper Heuristic Optimization Methods for the Tuning of Input Parameters of Simulation Models is accepted to be published in the proceedings of the 19th European Modeling and Simulation Symposium (EMSS'07). The EMSS conference will take place from October 4-6, 2007 in Bergeggi (Sv), Italy.

June 19, 2007

Michael Affenzeller is awarded the title Prof. (FH) for his dedication as professor at the Upper Austrian Unviersity of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg. The HeuristicLab Development team congratulates whole-heartedly!

June 16, 2007

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Evolutionary Design of Virtual Sensors (written by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, Stefan Wagner, Gabriel Kronberger and Andreas Beham) at the Industrial Symposium on Mechatronics ISM2007 on October 4, 2007 at the Design Center in Linz, Austria.

May 25, 2007

The HeuristicLab development team is once again proud to officially welcome Monika Kofler on board. Monika has studied Medical Software Engineering at the Upper Austrian University of Applied Science in Hagenberg and graduated last year with distinction. More details are available at her contact page.

May 21, 2007

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Variables Diversity in Systems Identification based on Extended Genetic Programming at the XVI International Conference on Systems Science, September 4 - 6, 2007 in Wroclaw, Poland.

May 15, 2007

Michael Affenzeller is going to present a joint contribution with Stefan Wagner and Stephan Winkler titled Aspects of Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Evolution in July at the upcoming GECCO'07 in London, UK.

May 08, 2007

The HeuristicLab development team is pleased to officially welcome Andreas Beham on board. Andreas has developed several plug-ins since 2004, e.g. Tabu Search, Scatter Search and Sudoku and we're pleased that we could integrate him into our team. More details are available at his contact page.

Feb. 12-16, 2007

The HeuristicLab development team is attending the EuroCAST2007 conference. Papers will be published in an upcoming edition of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Jul. 13, 2006

During the Eleventh International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory (eurocast 07) a workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving is organized by Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner. The Workshop will mainly focus on new algorithmic developments, theory and applications of Genetic Algorithms, theory and applications of Genetic Programming, other metaheuristics (like Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Scatter Search, Ant Systems), hybridization, parallel metaheuristics, and applications in combinatorial optimization, bio- and medical informatics, networks and telecommunications.

Feb. 08, 2006

With the 1st of February the FWF Translational-Research-Project "GP-Based Methods for the Design of Virtual Sensors" has started. The project is held in cooperation with the Institute for Design and Control of Mechatronical Systems of the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Together with the official start of the project we are glad to welcome back Stephan Winkler also locally. Further details are available at his contact page.

Dec. 21, 2005

The HeuristicLab development team is pleased to officially welcome Gabriel Kronberger on board. Gabriel has developed HeuristicLab Hive, HeuristicLab Grid and several plug-ins since 2004 and so it's high time now to make him a steady team member. More details are available at his contact page.

Nov. 19, 2005

The two papers "Solving Multiclass Classification Problems by Genetic Programming" and "SexualGA: Gender-Specific Selection for Genetic Algorithms" presented at WMSCI 2005 were honored with the best paper awards for the sessions "Management Information Systems" and "Artificial Intelligence / Expert Systems". More details are available at the publications page.

Nov. 07, 2005

With the 1st of November Michael Affenzeller started to work as professor for applied computer science at the Department of Software Engineering of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences. More details can be found on his contact page.

Oct. 24, 2005

The new version 1.3.0 of the VRP plug-in (implemented by Michael Bögl) and the new version 1.1.1 of the SAT plug-in (implemented by Florian Lonsing) are available at the plug-ins page.

Oct. 18, 2005

The FWF Translational-Research-Project "GP-Based Methods for the Design of Virtual Sensors" has been approved. The project is planned to start in January 2006 in cooperation with the Institute for Design and Control of Mechatronical Systems of the Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Sep. 30, 2005

With the 1st of October Stefan Wagner will start to work as associate professor for software project engineering at the Department of Software Engineering of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences. More details can be found on his contact page.

Sep. 10, 2005

The project paper of the Satisfiability Problem (SAT) plug-in (implemented by Florian Lonsing) is available at the documentation page.

Sep. 09, 2005

A new HeuristicLab 1.1.0 Setup is available containing the latest versions of all plug-ins. It can be downloaded from the download page.

Sep. 09, 2005

Release of the Genetic Algorithm-Based Machine Learning (GBML) plug-in and the Standard Genetic Algorithm for Machine Learning (SGAML) plug-in (both implemented by Dietmar Langer). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 09, 2005

Release of the Satisfiability Problem (SAT) plug-in (implemented by Florian Lonsing). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 09, 2005

Release of the Scatter Search (SS) plug-in and the Standard Tabu Search (STS) plug-in (both implemented by Andreas Beham). The STS plug-in replaces the old Tabu Search plug-in (TS). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 09, 2005

New versions of the ATSP (1.1.1), TSP (1.1.1), VRP (1.2.0), TF2D (1.1.1), TFND (1.1.1), and GP (1.1.1) plug-ins are available. In the new version of the GP plug-in the bugs reported at the 25th of August are corrected. More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 05, 2005

The paper "New Methods for the Identification of Nonlinear Model Structures Based Upon Genetic Programming Techniques" by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner has been published in the Journal of System Science (vol. 31, no. 1). More details are available at the publications page.

Aug. 25, 2005

Due to the upgrade from version 1.0.0 to version 1.1.0 the GP plug-in got unstable. A bugfix will be released within the next few days.

Aug. 22, 2005

Roland Braune started to work at the R&D Competence Center of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences. More details can be found on his contact page.

Aug. 19, 2005

Release of HeuristicLab 1.1.0
The new version of HeuristicLab is available at the download page. More details about the changes can be found on the project history page.

Aug. 17, 2005

The book "Moderne Heuristiken der Produktionsplanung am Beispiel der Maschinenbelegung" written by G. Zäpfel and R. Braune has been published by the Vahlen Verlag München. More details are available at the publications page.

Aug. 17, 2005

Some problem examples for the Genetic (Symbolic) Regression Problem (GR) plug-in are available. They can be downloaded from the plug-ins page.

Aug. 16, 2005

Release of the Genetic (Symbolic) Regression Problem (GR) plug-in (implemented by Reinhard Zierhofer). More details about the plug-in are available at the documentation page and in Reinhard's master thesis.

Aug. 16, 2005

Release of the Sudoku Problem (Sudoku) plug-in (implemented by Andreas Beham). More details about the Sudoku Problem are available at wikipedia here.

Jul. 27, 2005

The paper "On-Line Modeling Based on Genetic Programming" written by S. Winkler, H. Efendic, M. Affenzeller, L. Del Re and S. Wagner will be presented at ALaRT 05 and has been accepted for publication in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (IJISTA). More details are available at the publications page.

Jun. 13, 2005

"Population Genetics and Evolutionary Computation: Theoretical and Practical Aspects", the habilitation thesis of Michael Affenzeller, has been published as a book by the Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner. More details are available at the publications page.

Jun. 09, 2005

The two papers "The Influence of Population Genetics for the Redesign of Genetic Algorithms" and "HeuristicLab Grid - A Flexible and Extensible Environment for Parallel Heuristic Optimization" by Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner have been published in the Journal of System Science (vol. 30, no. 4). More details are available at the publications page.

May 20, 2005

Starting shot of the development of HeuristicLab 2.0. More details will be published soon.

Apr. 10, 2005

A new paid master thesis topic titled "Using Genetic Programming to Optimize Priority Rules" is available. More details can be found on the theses page.

Feb. 24, 2005

The three papers of Stefan Wagner, Stephan Winkler, and Roland Braune were accepted at the 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) 2005 in Orlando, Florida, USA. More details are available at the publications page.

Feb. 12, 2005

Experimental results concerning Allele Frequency Analysis are now presented in the Results section.

Feb. 03, 2005

Experimental results concerning Logistic Regression are now presented in the new Results section.

Feb. 03, 2005

"Looking Inside Genetic Algorithms", the diploma thesis of Stefan Wagner, has been published as a book by the Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner. More details are available at the publications page.

Jan. 14, 2005

We are pleased to welcome Roland Braune and Stephan Winkler, who have become main members of the HeuristicLab development team. Take a look at the contact pages to get more information about them.

Nov. 22, 2004

The paper "HeuristicLab: A Generic and Extensible Optimization Environment" was accepted at the International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms (ICANNGA) 2005 in Coimbra, Portugal.

Nov. 18, 2004

Release of HeuristicLab 1.0.0

Nov. 04, 2004

HeuristicLab homepage goes online

Oct. 11, 2004

Release of the Tabu Search (TS) plug-in (implemented by Andreas Beham). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Oct. 08, 2004

Release of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) plug-in (implemented by Roland Braune). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 16, 2004

Release of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) plug-in (implemented by Michael Bögl). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Sep. 08, 2004

Presentation of the paper "HeuristicLab Grid - A Flexible and Extensible Environment for Parallel Heuristic Optimization" at the International Conference of Systems Science (ICSS) 2004 in Wroclaw, Poland

Jul. 01, 2004

Release of the Genetic Programming (GP) plug-in (implemented by Jörg Pührer). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Oct. 23, 2003

Release of the n-dimensional Test Functions (TestFunctionsND) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Wagner). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Aug. 26, 2003

Beginning of the development of HeuristicLab Grid

Aug. 20, 2003

Release of the Coarse-Grained Parallel Genetic Algorithm (IslandGA) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Wagner). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Aug. 07, 2003

Release of the Evolution Strategy (ES) plug-in (implemented by Mihaela Ionescu). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Jul. 08, 2003

Release of the Steady-State Genetic Algorithm (SSGA) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Pichler). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Jul. 08, 2003

Release of the Simulated Annealing (SA) plug-in (implemented by Florian Ortner and Harald Radi). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Apr. 29, 2003

Release of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Wagner). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Apr. 04, 2003

Release of the 2-dimensional Test Functions (TestFunctions2D) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Wagner). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Mar. 11, 2003

Birth of SASEGASA

Feb. 26, 2003

Release of the Rotor Machine Analysis Problem (RMAP) plug-in (implemented by Stefan Wagner and Daniel Schragl). More details are available at the plug-ins page.

Dec. 27, 2002

First inofficial release of HeuristicLab 1.0.0. equipped with Random Search (RS), Standard Genetic Algorithm (SGA), Sexual Genetic Algorithm (SXGA), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP), and Multiprocessor Scheduling Problem (MPSP) plug-ins. JSSP and MPSP were implemented by Stephan Winkler.

Summer 2002

Starting shot of the development of HeuristicLab

Summer 2000

Birth of SEGA

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