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Thanks for having a look! What do you use EAs/optimizations for in your work? As I was doing research for the project, I had a hard time coming across concrete

• matsemann 2y ago
  I work in logistics. I can't write too much about it, but many things suit EAs well. Often it's a local search with a nice objective function that pops out when you model a problem. Like, "where should things be placed at the warehouse" is the state/solution, and the fitness function is "given last month of sales, how would these placements affect our operational metrics". And then scale it up from local search to EAs, since searching the solution space in parallel and cross-reuse good smaller parts between the solutions are beneficial.
  • thomascountz 2y ago
    Thanks! It sounds like a really satisfying domain to work in. If you're willing to share, in industry, is the work in modeling the domain to fit the EA tooling, or is there a lot of work done in tuning the various operations, i.e. crossover, mutation, etc.?
  • steve_gh 2y ago
    That sounds really interesting - I have used GAs to optimise scheduling partition problems: Given a set of postcodes, a volume of work in each postcode, and preferences in that postcode for appointment times, find a schema to divide a geographic area to be served by N teams (where the N areas don't have to be contiguous)