IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
5 - 8 June 2017, Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain

Extended deadline: 30 January 2017

Accepted papers of the highest quality will be invited for extension to a Special Issue of the Theoretical Computer Science journal.

Bio-inspired search heuristics often turn out to be highly successful for optimization in practice. The theory of these randomized search heuristics explains the success or the failure of these methods in practical applications. Theoretical analyses lead to the understanding of which problems are optimized (or approximated) efficiently by a given algorithm and which are not.

The benefits of theoretical understanding for practitioners are threefold.

• Aiding the algorithm design,
• guiding the choice of the best algorithm for the problem at hand,
• determining the optimal parameter settings.

The theory of evolutionary computation has grown rapidly in recent years. The primary aim of this special session is to bring together people working on theoretical aspects of bio-inspired computation. The latest breakthroughs in the theory of bio-inspired computation will be reported and new directions will be set.

Potential authors are invited to submit papers describing original contributions to foundations of evolutionary computation. Although we are most interested in theoretical foundations, computational studies of a foundational nature are also welcome.

The scope of this special session includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:

• Theoretical foundations of bio-inspired heuristics
• Exact and approximation runtime analysis
• Black box complexity
• Self-adaptation
• Population dynamics
• Fitness landscape and problem difficulty analysis
• No free lunch theorems
• Statistical approaches for understanding the behaviour of bio-inspired heuristics
• Computational studies of a foundational nature

All problem domains will be considered including:

• combinatorial and continuous optimisation
• single‐objective and multi‐objective optimisation
• constraint handling
• dynamic and stochastic optimisation
• co‐evolution and evolutionary learning

To submit to the special session:

1. prepare your manuscript following the IEEE WCCI 2016 paper submission guidelines (see http://www.cec2017.org),
2. submit your manuscript electronically to the CEC 2017 submission system,
3. IMPORTANT: in the submission system you must select SS31. Theoretical Foundations of Bio-inspired Computation as Main Research Topic.

Special session papers are treated in the same way as regular conference papers.

• Paper submissions: 16 January 2017 30 January 2017 (extended deadline)
• Notification of acceptance: 26 February 2017 6 March 2017

Pietro S. Oliveto
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

Andrew M. Sutton
Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Universität Potsdam
Potsdam, Germany