Over fifty scientists come together for MACODA
In the week of 16 – 21 September, an international group of more than 50 scientists met at the Many Criteria Optimization and Decision Analysis (MACODA) workshop. They discussed many-criteria optimization, which is the searching for optimal solutions when one has to consider a larger number of criteria. The MACODA workshop was organized by the Lorentz Center and Michael Emmerich, associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS).
Traditional methods do not work
Many-criteria problems occur, for instance, in urban planning, drug discovery and in multidisciplinary engineering design. In such problems a large number of potentially conflicting objectives need to be optimized. Traditional multi-objective optimization methods work only on problems with a very small number of objectives. Due to their high dimensionality, the problems with a larger number of objective functions, so-called many-objective problems, differ not only quantitatively but also qualitatively in their characteristics from problems with smaller numbers of objectives.
New research agenda
The workshop aimed to develop and disseminate a community-led research agenda for many-criteria optimization. By discussing and creating a research agenda the organizers hope for a step-change in the understanding of many-criteria optimization.