CALL FOR PAPERS
SECOND METAHEURISTIC DESIGN PATTERNS (MetaDeeP) WORKSHOP
GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE
(GECCO-2015) July 11-15, 2015, Madrid, Spain.

Submission deadline: April 3, 2015
Workshop website: : http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~clsimons/MetaDeeP2015/workshop_v2.html

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Design Patterns are structured heuristics which capture the essentials of recurring practice in an abstract form. Their widespread use has revolutionized the software industry and the previous successful workshop on Metaheuristic Design Patterns (MetaDeeP @ GECCO 2014) demonstrated that similar refactorings are possible in optimization research.

If you are interested in moving towards higher-levels of research communicability and automation, then you should attend MetaDeeP 2015, the second such workshop, to be held at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), 11-15 July 2015 in Madrid, Spain.

Design patterns are often presented in the following format:

* Intent: A description of the goal behind the pattern and the reason for using it.

* Forces acting: Pre-conditions for the application of the pattern.

* Structure: A description of the abstract mechanism of the pattern.

* Consequences: The likely results and tradeoffs of pattern application.

* Examples: Concrete use-cases (it is usual to have at least 3 examples to be `pattern-worthy').

Scope

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We welcome submissions of original and unpublished work that presents ideas of interest to the optimization community in a `Design Patterns' format, including (but not limited to) the following areas:

* Application of existing software design patterns to metaheuristics.

e.g.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609848,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609843.

* Identification of a `cross-cutting' abstraction of general use.
e.g.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609842,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609847,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609844,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609845.

* Pattern-based decompositions of existing frameworks or methodologies.

e.g.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609846,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609841,
[3] below.

* Descriptions of workflow or design automation.

e.g.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609849,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609850.

When applied programmatically within the optimization workflow, Design Patterns can be seen as a generalized and structured form of algorithm selection/hyper-heuristics.

Particularly welcome therefore are submissions that include detail on how their pattern might be applied in an automated fashion, such as:

* To what extent can the `Forces acting' in a metaheuristic design pattern be expressed programmatically?

* Can the `consequences' of pattern application be defined in a similar manner?

The AI community has a long tradition of expressing rule-based systems and there are many useful mechanisms for this. Machine learning mechanisms for rule induction are similarly well-developed, leading to the following open issues in the automated and adaptive design of metaheuristics:

* Which _metrics_ (whether obtained online or offline) can be used to express the `Forces acting' for a pattern?

* Which metrics might be applicable across a range of patterns? (see [2] for more detail on this).

Submission instructions

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We invite submissions of up to 8 pages in length. Please see the GECCO 2015 information for authors for further details. Note that the review process of the workshop is not double-blind and hence authors' information should appear in the paper.

We envisage that while proposals for pattern languages and automated metaheuristic design may require a fuller discussion of up to 8 pages, while suggestions for newly-identified MDPs may be characterized by shorter submissions.

An example of a submission using the recommended pattern description format is http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598394.2609844.

Papers should be submitted in PDF format to MetaDeeP2015@gmail.com, containing the subject line "Metaheuristic Design Patterns Workshop".

All accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and appear in the GECCO workshop volume. Proceedings of the workshop will be published in the ACM Digital Library and distributed at the conference.

Expanded versions of sufficiently high quality submissions will be considered for inclusion in a forthcoming Springer volume.

Important Dates

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Submission deadline: April 3, 2015

Author notification: April 20, 2015

Camera-ready submissions: May 4, 2015

Author registration deadline: May 4, 2015

GECCO-2015: July 11-15, 2015.

Workshop Chairs

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Chris Simons - University of the West of England, United Kingdom.
chris.simons -at- uwe.ac.uk

Jerry Swan - University of Stirling, United Kingdom.
jsw–at- cs.stir.ac.uk

Krzysztof Krawiec - Poznan University of Technology, Poland.
krawiec –at- cs.put.poznan.pl

Daniel Tauritz – Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA.
tauritzd –at- mst.edu

Jim Smith – University of the West of England, United Kingdom
james.smith –at- uwe.ac.uk


References

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[1] Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley Boston, USA. 1995.

[2] Jerry Swan http://goo.gl/VIx49N

[3] Natalio Krasnogor. Handbook of Natural Computation, chapter “Memetic Algorithms”. Natural Computing. Springer Berlin, 2009.