Metaheuristics "In the Large"

TL;DR

This paper advocates for standardized protocols and infrastructure in metaheuristics research to enhance reproducibility, comparability, and scientific progress in the field.

Contribution

It proposes a unified infrastructure and common protocols for metaheuristics to improve research quality and facilitate exploration of the design space.

Findings

Adoption of common protocols can improve reproducibility.

Standardized infrastructure enables better comparison of metaheuristics.

Progress in the field depends on scientific and computational support.

Abstract

Following decades of sustained improvement, metaheuristics are one of the great success stories of optimization research. However, in order for research in metaheuristics to avoid fragmentation and a lack of reproducibility, there is a pressing need for stronger scientific and computational infrastructure to support the development, analysis and comparison of new approaches. We argue that, via principled choice of infrastructure support, the field can pursue a higher level of scientific enquiry. We describe our vision and report on progress, showing how the adoption of common protocols for all metaheuristics can help liberate the potential of the field, easing the exploration of the design space of metaheuristics.