skip to main content
10.1145/3583133.3596306acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgeccoConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Replicable Self-Documenting Experiments with Arbitrary Search Spaces and Algorithms

Published: 24 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce moptipy, a toolbox for implementing, experimenting with, and applying optimization algorithms. It features mechanisms for executing fully reproducible experiments. Our seeding procedure for random number generators makes our experiments deterministic. Our system creates self-documenting log files that store the algorithm setup, the system configuration, the random seed, the final solutions, and the progress of the optimization algorithm over time. The parallelization and distribution of experiments works on most operating systems and requires no additional synchronization, inter-process-communication, or libraries. moptipy supports both single- and multi-objective optimization with arbitrary search spaces. Time measurements and computational budgets can be based both on wall clock time and objective function evaluations. moptipy is also an educational platform with comprehensive documentation and an accompanying free electronic book introducing the basic concepts of metaheuristics, discussing the implemented algorithms, and showing their performance on basis of actual experimental results.

References

[1]
ACM. 2020. Artifact Review and Badging, Version 1.1. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-and-badging-current
[2]
John Edward Beasley. 1990. OR-Library: Distributing Test Problems by Electronic Mail. The Journal of the Operational Research Society 41 (1990), 1069--1072.
[3]
Mark S. Boddy and Thomas L. Dean. 1989. Solving Time-Dependent Planning Problems. Technical Report CS-89-03. Brown University, Department of Computer Science, Providence, RI, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/techreports/89/cs89-03.pdf
[4]
NumPy Community. 2022. Permuted Congruential Generator (64-bit, PCG64). In NumPy Reference, Release 1.23.0. NumFOCUS, Inc., Austin, TX, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://numpy.org/doc/1.23/numpy-ref.pdf
[5]
Kalyanmoy Deb, Samir Agrawal, Amrit Pratap, and T. Meyarivan. 2000. A Fast Elitist Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm for Multi-Objective Optimization: NSGA-II. In Intl. Conf. on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN VI), Sept. 18--20, 2000, Paris, France (LNCS, Vol. 1917). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 849--858.
[6]
Carola Doerr, Hao Wang, Furong Ye, Sander van Rijn, and Thomas Bäck. 2018. IOHprofiler: A Benchmarking and Profiling Tool for Iterative Optimization Heuristics. Cornell University, New York, NY, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.05281.pdf arXiv:1810.05281v1 [cs.NE] 11 Oct 2018.
[7]
Carola Doerr, Furong Ye, Naama Horesh, Hao Wang, Ofer M. Shir, and Thomas Bäck. 2020. Benchmarking Discrete Optimization Heuristics with IOHprofiler. Applied Soft Computing 88, 106027 (2020), 1--21.
[8]
Marco Dorigo and Thomas Stützle. 2004. Ant Colony Optimization. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
[9]
Ingy döt Net, Tina Müller, Pantelis Antoniou, Eemeli Aro, and Thomas Smith. 2021. YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML®) version 1.2, Revision 1.2.2 (2021-10-01). YAML Language Development Team, Seattle, WA, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/
[10]
Johann Dreo, Arnaud Liefooghe, Sébastien Verel, Marc Schoenauer, Juan J. Merelo, Alexandre Quemy, Benjamin Bouvier, and Jan Gmys. 2021. Paradiseo: From a Modular Framework for Evolutionary Computation to the Automated Design of Metaheuristics: 22 Years of Paradiseo. In Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conf. Companion, July 10--14, 2021, Lille, France, Francisco Chicano (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1522--1530.
[11]
Olive Jean Dunn. 1961. Multiple Comparisons Among Means. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 56, 293 (1961), 52--64.
[12]
David Edward Goldberg. 1989. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley Longman, Boston, MA, USA.
[13]
Odd Erik Gundersen, Yolanda Gil, and David W. Aha. 2018. On Reproducible AI: Towards Reproducible Research, Open Science, and Digital Scholarship in AI Publications. AI Magazine 39, 3 (2018), 56--68.
[14]
Nikolaus Hansen, Anne Auger, Steffen Finck, and Raymond Ros. 2010. Real-Parameter Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking 2010: Experimental Setup. Rapports de Recherche RR-7215. Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). Retrieved 2023-01-21 from http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00462481 inria-00462481.
[15]
Nikolaus Hansen, Anne Auger, Raymond Ros, Olaf Mersmann, Tea Tušar, and Dimo Brockhoff. 2021. COCO: A Platform for Comparing Continuous Optimizers in a Black-Box Setting. Optimization Methods and Software 36 (2021), 114--144. Issue 1. also arXiv:1603.08785v4 [cs.AI] 9 Sep 2020.
[16]
Nikolaus Hansen and Andreas Ostermeier. 2001. A Completely Derandomized Self-Adaptation in Evolution Strategies. Evolutionary Computation 9, 2 (2001), 159--195.
[17]
Nikolaus Hansen, Tea Tušar, Olaf Mersmann, Anne Auger, and Dimo Brockhoff. 2016. COCO: The Experimental Procedure. Cornell University, New York, NY, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08776 arXiv:1603.08776v2 [cs.AI] 19 May 2016.
[18]
Myles Hollander and Douglas Alan Wolfe. 1973. Nonparametric Statistical Methods. John Wiley and Sons Ltd., New York, NY, USA.
[19]
Holger H. Hoos and Thomas Stützle. 1998. Evaluating Las Vegas Algorithms - Pitfalls and Remedies. In 14th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'98), July 24--26, 1998, Madison, WI, USA, Gregory F. Cooper and Serafín Moral (Eds.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, USA, 238--245.
[20]
Holger H. Hoos and Thomas Stützle. 2005. Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications. Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[21]
IEEE and The Open Group. 2018. open, openat - open file. In The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, IEEE Std 1003.1-2017 (Revision of IEEE Std 1003.1-2008). IEEE and The Open Group, Burlington, MA, USA. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/open.html
[22]
Yan Jiang, Thomas Weise, Jörg Lässig, Raymond Chiong, and Rukshan Athauda. 2014. Comparing a Hybrid Branch and Bound Algorithm with Evolutionary Computation Methods, Local Search and their Hybrids on the TSP. In IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Production and Logistics Systems (CIPLS'14), part of the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI'14), Dec. 9--12, 2014, Orlando, FL, USA. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 148--155.
[23]
Tianyu Liang, Zhize Wu, Jörg Lässig, Daan van den Berg, and Thomas Weise. 2022. Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem using Frequency Fitness Assignment. In IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computational Intelligence. IEEE, Los Alamitos, USA, 360--367.
[24]
Laurent Meunier, Herilalaina Rakotoarison, Pak Kan Wong, Baptiste Roziere, Jeremy Rapin, Olivier Teytaud, Antoine Moreau, and Carola Doerr. 2021. Black-Box Optimization Revisited: Improving Algorithm Selection Wizards through Massive Benchmarking. Cornell University, New York, NY, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.04542v3 arXiv:2010.04542v3 [cs.LG] 23 Feb 2021.
[25]
Heinz Mühlenbein. 1992. How Genetic Algorithms Really Work: Mutation and Hillclimbing. In Proceedings of Parallel Problem Solving from Nature 2 (PPSN-II), Sept. 28--30, 1992, Brussels, Belgium. Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 15--26.
[26]
Melissa E. O'Neill. 2014. PCG: A Family of Simple Fast Space-Efficient Statistically Good Algorithms for Random Number Generation. Technical Report HMC-CS-2014-0905. Harvey Mudd College, Computer Science Department, Claremont, CA, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://www.cs.hmc.edu/tr/hmc-cs-2014-0905.pdf
[27]
Michael James David Powell. 2009. The BOBYQA Algorithm for Bound Constrained Optimization without Derivatives. Technical Report DAMTP 2009/NA06. Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/na/NA_papers/NA2009_06.pdf
[28]
Penny Pritzker and Willie E. May (Eds.). 2015. Secure Hash Standard (SHS). Federal Information Processing Standards Publication, Vol. FIPS PUB 180-4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory, Gaithersburg, MD, USA.
[29]
Jeremy Rapin and Olivier Teytaud. 2018. Nevergrad - A Gradient-Free Optimization Platform. GitHub, San Francisco, CA, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://gitHub.com/FacebookResearch/Nevergrad
[30]
Keivan Tafakkori. 2023. List of optimization packages in Python. GitHub, San Francisco, CA, USA. Retrieved on 2023-01-15 from https://ktafakkori.github.io/optimization-packages-in-python-list/
[31]
Dave Andrew Douglas Tompkins and Holger H. Hoos. 2004. UBCSAT: An Implementation and Experimentation Environment for SLS Algorithms for SAT and MAX-SAT. In Revised Selected Papers from the Seventh Intl. Conf. on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT'04), May 10--13, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada (LNCS, Vol. 3542). Springer-Verlag GmbH, Berlin, Germany, 306--320.
[32]
Unicode Consortium (Ed.). 2022. The Unicode® Standard, Version 15.0 - Core Specification. Unicode, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/
[33]
Pauli Virtanen et al. and SciPy 1.0 Contributors. 2020. SciPy 1.0: Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python. Nature Methods 17 (2020), 261--272.
[34]
Hao Wang, Diederick Vermetten, Furong Ye, Carola Doerr, and Thomas Bäck. 2022. IOHanalyzer: Detailed Performance Analyses for Iterative Optimization Heuristics. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization 2 (2022), 1--29. Issue 1[3].
[35]
Thomas Weise. 2009. Global Optimization Algorithms - Theory and Application. Institute of Applied Optimization, Hefei University, Hefei, Anhui, China. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from http://iao.hfuu.edu.cn/images/publications/W2009GOEB.pdf
[36]
Thomas Weise. 2017. From Standardized Data Formats to Standardized Tools for Optimization Algorithm Benchmarking. In 16th IEEE Conf. on Cognitive Informatics & Cognitive Computing (ICCI*CC'17), July 26--28, 2017, Oxford, UK. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 490--497.
[37]
Thomas Weise. 2020--2023. Optimization Algorithms. Institute of Applied Optimization, School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Hefei University, Hefei, Anhui, China. Retrieved 2023-01-21 from https://thomasweise.github.io/oa
[38]
Thomas Weise, Yan Chen, Xinlu Li, and Zhize Wu. 2020. Selecting a diverse set of benchmark instances from a tunable model problem for black-box discrete optimization algorithms. Applied Soft Computing 92 (2020), 106269.
[39]
Thomas Weise, Raymond Chiong, Ke Tang, Jörg Lässig, Shigeyoshi Tsutsui, Wenxiang Chen, Zbigniew Michalewicz, and Xin Yao. 2014. Benchmarking Optimization Algorithms: An Open Source Framework for the Traveling Salesman Problem. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine 9, 3 (2014), 40--52.
[40]
Thomas Weise, Li Niu, and Ke Tang. 2010. AOAB - Automated Optimization Algorithm Benchmarking. In 12th Annual Conf. Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO'10), July 7--11, 2010, Portland, OR, USA. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 1479--1486.
[41]
Thomas Weise, Xiaofeng Wang, Qi Qi, Bin Li, and Ke Tang. 2018. Automatically discovering clusters of algorithm and problem instance behaviors as well as their causes from experimental data, algorithm setups, and instance features. Applied Soft Computing 73 (2018), 366--382.
[42]
Thomas Weise, Yuezhong Wu, Raymond Chiong, Ke Tang, and Jörg Lässig. 2016. Global versus Local Search: The Impact of Population Sizes on Evolutionary Algorithm Performance. Journal of Global Optimization 66 (2016), 511--534. Issue 3.
[43]
Weixiong Zhang. 1999. Truncated and Anytime Depth-First Branch and Bound: A Case Study on the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem. In AAAI Spring Symposium Series: Search Techniques for Problem Solving Under Uncertainty and Incomplete Information (AAAI Technical Report, Vol. SS-99-07). AAAI, Menlo Park, CA, USA, 148--155.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '23 Companion: Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation
July 2023
2519 pages
ISBN:9798400701207
DOI:10.1145/3583133
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 July 2023

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. metaheuristics
  2. software
  3. Python
  4. reproducibility
  5. parallel optimization
  6. distributed optimization

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • University Natural Sciences Research Project of Anhui Province
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • Key Research Plan of Anhui
  • Hefei Specially Recruited Foreign Expert program
  • Hefei Foreign Expert Office program
  • Youth Project of the Provincial Natural Science Foundation of Anhui

Conference

GECCO '23 Companion
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media