Section: Software and Platforms

COmparing Continuous Optimizers

Participants : Nikolaus Hansen [correspondent] , Anne Auger, Marc Schoenauer, Ouassim Ait Elhara, Asma Atamna.

Keywords: Evolutionary Computation, Stochastic Optimization, Real-parameter Optimization, Benchmarking, Derivative Free Optimization.

COCO (COmparing Continuous Optimizers) is a platform for systematic and sound comparisons of real-parameter global optimizers. COCO provides benchmark function testbeds (noiseless and noisy) and tools for processing and visualizing data generated by one or several optimizers. The code for processing experiments is provided in Matlab, C, Java, and Python. The post-processing code is provided in Python. The code is under continuous developement and has been used for the GECCO 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013 workshops on “Black Box Optimization Benchmarking” (BBOB) (see Section  6.1 ). It is now undergoing major changes thanks to the ANR project NumBBO that will add constraint handling and multi-objective benchmarks to the existing platform.

Link: http://coco.gforge.inria.fr/ and http://numbbo.gforge.inria.fr/