The 15th edition of the Spanish Conference on Metaheuristics, Evolutionary and Bioinspired Algorithms (MAEB 2024) was held within the Conference of the Spanish IA Association (CAEPIA 2024), which was this year a part of the major Computer Science academic event in Spain, namely, the VII Spanish Computer Science Congress (CEDI 2024). The MAEB conference took place in the premises of the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of A Coruña, and was scientifically organized by David Camacho and Juan Ramón Rabuñal. As usual, the conference gathered most of the leading Spanish researchers in the field, as well as a notable representation of younger researchers, some of whom were experiencing for the first time what an academic conference is like.
The Bio4Res project made their presence felt at the conference with the presentation of the paper entitled «Un Algoritmo Memético para la Optimización de la Evacuación de Interiores» by C. Cotta, whose abstract (translated into English, since the work was done in Spanish) follows:
This work considers the optimization of indoor evacuation via the strategic placement of emergency exits. Building upon a cellular automaton used to model the behavior of a crowd evacuating a venue, a memetic approach is proposed combining evolutionary algorithms and derivative-free numerical optimization techniques. The experimental evaluation shows the superiority of the memetic algorithm over its individual components, supporting their synergistic interaction, and the usefulness of this memetic approach in the considered domain.
Carlos Cotta, Un Algoritmo Memético para la Optimización de la Evacuación de Interiores, Actas de la XX Conferencia de la Asociación Española para la Inteligencia Artificial, Amparo Alonso et al (eds.), pp. 433-437, A Coruña, Spain, 2024.
As usual, both the data instances and the source code used in the experimentation have been released. The presentation was followed by an engaging Q&A round during which several interesting suggestions were put forward by the audience. Overall, the conference was a very pleasant experience, and gave attendees the opportunity to enjoy not just cutting-edge research but also the hospitality of the beautiful Atlantic town of A Coruña. Thanks to the organizers for making this possible!