Sander van Rijn

Christian Doh Dinga, Francesco Lombardi, Roald Arkesteijn et al.

District heating networks (DHNs) have significant potential to decarbonize residential heating and accelerate the energy transition. However, designing carbon-neutral DHNs requires balancing several objectives, including economic costs, social acceptance, long-term uncertainties, and grid-integration challenges from electrification. By combining modeling-to-generate-alternatives with power flow simulation techniques, we develop a decision-support method for designing carbon-neutral DHNs that are cost-effective, socially acceptable, robust to future risks, and impose minimal impacts on the electricity grid. Applying our method to a Dutch case, we find substantial diversity in how carbon-neutral DHNs can be designed. The flexibility in technology choice, sizing, and location enables accommodating different real-world needs and achieving high electrification levels without increasing grid loading. For instance, intelligently located heat pumps and thermal storage can limit grid stress even when renewable baseload heat sources and green-fuel boilers are scarce. Using our method, planners can explore diverse carbon-neutral DHN designs and identify the design that best balances stakeholders' preferences.

Diederick Vermetten, Sander van Rijn, Thomas Bäck et al.

In the field of evolutionary computation, one of the most challenging topics is algorithm selection. Knowing which heuristics to use for which optimization problem is key to obtaining high-quality solutions. We aim to extend this research topic by taking a first step towards a selection method for adaptive CMA-ES algorithms. We build upon the theoretical work done by van Rijn \textit{et al.} [PPSN'18], in which the potential of switching between different CMA-ES variants was quantified in the context of a modular CMA-ES framework. We demonstrate in this work that their proposed approach is not very reliable, in that implementing the suggested adaptive configurations does not yield the predicted performance gains. We propose a revised approach, which results in a more robust fit between predicted and actual performance. The adaptive CMA-ES approach obtains performance gains on 18 out of 24 tested functions of the BBOB benchmark, with stable advantages of up to 23\%. An analysis of module activation indicates which modules are most crucial for the different phases of optimizing each of the 24 benchmark problems. The module activation also suggests that additional gains are possible when including the (B)IPOP modules, which we have excluded for this present work.

Carola Doerr, Hao Wang, Furong Ye et al.

IOHprofiler is a new tool for analyzing and comparing iterative optimization heuristics. Given as input algorithms and problems written in C or Python, it provides as output a statistical evaluation of the algorithms' performance by means of the distribution on the fixed-target running time and the fixed-budget function values. In addition, IOHprofiler also allows to track the evolution of algorithm parameters, making our tool particularly useful for the analysis, comparison, and design of (self-)adaptive algorithms. IOHprofiler is a ready-to-use software. It consists of two parts: an experimental part, which generates the running time data, and a post-processing part, which produces the summarizing comparisons and statistical evaluations. The experimental part is build on the COCO software, which has been adjusted to cope with optimization problems that are formulated as functions $f:\mathcal{S}^n \to \R$ with $\mathcal{S}$ being a discrete alphabet of integers. The post-processing part is our own work. It can be used as a stand-alone tool for the evaluation of running time data of arbitrary benchmark problems. It accepts as input files not only the output files of IOHprofiler, but also original COCO data files. The post-processing tool is designed for an interactive evaluation, allowing the user to chose the ranges and the precision of the displayed data according to his/her needs. IOHprofiler is available on GitHub at \url{https://github.com/IOHprofiler}.

Carola Doerr, Furong Ye, Sander van Rijn et al.

Theoretical and empirical research on evolutionary computation methods complement each other by providing two fundamentally different approaches towards a better understanding of black-box optimization heuristics. In discrete optimization, both streams developed rather independently of each other, but we observe today an increasing interest in reconciling these two sub-branches. In continuous optimization, the COCO (COmparing Continuous Optimisers) benchmarking suite has established itself as an important platform that theoreticians and practitioners use to exchange research ideas and questions. No widely accepted equivalent exists in the research domain of discrete black-box optimization. Marking an important step towards filling this gap, we adjust the COCO software to pseudo-Boolean optimization problems, and obtain from this a benchmarking environment that allows a fine-grained empirical analysis of discrete black-box heuristics. In this documentation we demonstrate how this test bed can be used to profile the performance of evolutionary algorithms. More concretely, we study the optimization behavior of several $(1+λ)$ EA variants on the two benchmark problems OneMax and LeadingOnes. This comparison motivates a refined analysis for the optimization time of the $(1+λ)$ EA on LeadingOnes.

Sander van Rijn, Hao Wang, Matthijs van Leeuwen et al.

Various variants of the well known Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) have been proposed recently, which improve the empirical performance of the original algorithm by structural modifications. However, in practice it is often unclear which variation is best suited to the specific optimization problem at hand. As one approach to tackle this issue, algorithmic mechanisms attached to CMA-ES variants are considered and extracted as functional \emph{modules}, allowing for combinations of them. This leads to a configuration space over ES structures, which enables the exploration of algorithm structures and paves the way toward novel algorithm generation. Specifically, eleven modules are incorporated in this framework with two or three alternative configurations for each module, resulting in $4\,608$ algorithms. A self-adaptive Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to efficiently evolve effective ES-structures for given classes of optimization problems, outperforming any classical CMA-ES variants from literature. The proposed approach is evaluated on noiseless functions from BBOB suite. Furthermore, such an observation is again confirmed on different function groups and dimensionality, indicating the feasibility of ES configuration on real-world problem classes.