IEEE-CEC-2015 Special Session on

Evolutionary Exploration of Design Spaces

The annual IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC)
May 25-28, 2015, at Sendai International Center, Sendai, Japan

Background

During the various stages of the design process, engineers make decisions under many uncertainties concerning manufacturing, environment, and market demands. Wrong design decisions may lead to a large waste of company resources. At present a large part of design decisions, especially at the early stages of the design process, are made based primarily on the engineers' mental models and on their accumulated knowledge from past experiences. Engineers' ability to rationalize their decisions, and raise their design success, could be improved by increasing and substantiating their knowledge on the space of potential solutions.

During the advanced stages of design, computational models are often employed. The growing availability of such models makes it possible not just to support the selection of optimal solutions under the design objectives, but also to aim at robust solutions. The EC community has been successful in producing search and optimization algorithms for such computer-supported design, and in particular multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. With the increasing accessibility to powerful computer hardware, such models can also be used for design space exploration.