The GECCO 2024 conference took place in Melbourne (Australia) from July 14h to July 18th. This edition was locally organized by Xiaodong Li as General Chair, Julia Handl as Editor-in-Chief, and Markus Wagner as Local Chair. GECCO is presently the leading global conference in evolutionary computation, and once again this year’s edition certainly met expectations. Although the hybrid format made a part of the audience not being present on-site, most renowned EC experts in the world gathered at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre for the event.
The Bio4Res project was present at the conference with two works. The first one is entitled “Energy Consumption Analysis of Batch Runs of Evolutionary Algorithms” by C. Cotta and J. Martínez. This work stems from the project’s research line on sustainable bioinspired algorithms and focuses on the energy consumption of EAs when run in batch. The abstract follows:
We analyze the energy consumption of running evolutionary algorithms in batch as a function of the rest time between runs. It is shown that energy consumption can be reduced by 5%-8% by inserting short pauses between runs to reduce hysteretic phenomena.
C. Cotta, J. Martínez, Energy Consumption Analysis of Batch Runs of Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO ’24 Companion), July 14–18, 2024, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. doi: 10.1145/3638530.3664093
As to the second work, its title is «Navigating the Aisles: Evolutionary Algorithms for Supermarket Evacuation Planning» by C. Cotta. This works continues the Bio4Res research line on emergency evacuation, focusing this time on supermarket-like environments. This is the abstract:
We address the placement of emergency exits to facilitate the evacuation from supermarket-like environments. Using a simulation-based approach, evolutionary algorithms are shown to provide good results compared to a greedy heuristic and a numerical method.
C. Cotta, Navigating the Aisles: Evolutionary Algorithms for Supermarket Evacuation Planning, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO ’24 Companion), July 14–18, 2024, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. doi: 10.1145/3638530.3664096
In addition to presenting these works, Carlos Cotta had the pleasure of chairing a session on Real World Applications. Overall, GECCO was an excellent opportunity to discuss research and meeting again with old friends, such as Pablo Moscato. A great experience, for which the local organizers deserve praise. Kudos to Markus and all the team!