A Software Tool for Assisting Experimentation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract EN

In real world, many optimization problems are dynamic, which means that theirmodel elements vary with time.

These problems have received increasingattention over time, especially from the viewpoint of metaheuristics methods.

In this context, experimentation is a crucial task because of thestochastic nature of both algorithms and problems.

Currently, there are severaltechnologies whose methods, problems, and performance measures can be implemented.

However, in most of them, certain features that make the experimentation process easy arenot present.

Examples of such features are the statistical analysis of the results and a graphicaluser interface (GUI) that allows an easy management of the experimentation process.

Bearing inmind these limitations, in the present work, we present DynOptLab, a software tool for experimentalanalysis in dynamic environments.

DynOptLab has two main components: (1) anobject-oriented framework to facilitate the implementation of new proposals and(2) a graphical user interface for the experiment management and the statisticalanalysis of the results.

With the aim of verifying the benefits of DynOptLab’s main features, atypical case study on experimentation in dynamic environments was carried out.