Paradiseo: From a Modular Framework for Evolutionary Computation to the Automated Design of Metaheuristics ---22 Years of Paradiseo---

TL;DR

ParadisEO is a flexible, modular C++ framework that facilitates the development, testing, and automated design of diverse metaheuristics to address the varied landscapes of optimization problems.

Contribution

This paper presents ParadisEO, a comprehensive, modular software framework that supports flexible metaheuristic development and automated algorithm design for optimization tasks.

Findings

Provides a highly modular architecture for metaheuristics

Includes automated algorithm design features

Supports integration with higher-level software

Abstract

The success of metaheuristic optimization methods has led to the development of a large variety of algorithm paradigms. However, no algorithm clearly dominates all its competitors on all problems. Instead, the underlying variety of landscapes of optimization problems calls for a variety of algorithms to solve them efficiently. It is thus of prior importance to have access to mature and flexible software frameworks which allow for an efficient exploration of the algorithm design space. Such frameworks should be flexible enough to accommodate any kind of metaheuristics, and open enough to connect with higher-level optimization, monitoring and evaluation softwares. This article summarizes the features of the ParadisEO framework, a comprehensive C++ free software which targets the development of modular metaheuristics. ParadisEO provides a highly modular architecture, a large set of components, speed of execution and automated algorithm design features, which are key to modern approaches to metaheuristics development.