Please note: The project has been moved to github: https://github.com/mr-stateradio/mpoems-in-java

Author: thomas.kremmel / gmail

mPOEMS in JAVA is designed to provide optimisation problem developers with a tool to apply mPOEMS to their problem, without the need to know the complex algorithm in detail. Main goal is to use a state-of-the-art optimisation algorithm with small development effort.

Please find some more information about the project at the authors homepage http://thomaskremmel.com/mpoems/mpoems-info.php .

This work was created at the Technical University of Vienna, in close collaboration with Jiri Kubalik from the Technical University of Prague and Stefan Biffl fromm the Technical University of Vienna.

About mPOEMS

Crossover, mutation, and evolution of a population are the basic principles of the evolution and natural selection. Evolutionary algorithms (EA) imitate the nature’s behaviour, and adapt the basic principles, to evolve a set of solutions, towards the optimum solution of a problem.

mPOEMS is an optimisation framework, in the domain of evolutionary algorithms. It was designed to solve optimisation problems, with an unrestricted number of objectives. The algorithm has shown excellent performance in comparison with other state-of-the-art search algorithms. The paper including these results can be found using google scholar or directly using this link.

The drawback of Evolutionary Algorithms is their complexity, and the development effort one has to conduct to create an implementation of such an algorithm. An impressing approach to test and compare various evolutionary algorithms, with little programming effort, is presented by the PISA project. The project website can be found by following this link.

PISA is a platform and programming language independent interface for search algorithms. The use of PISA ensure easy, fast and reliable comparison of different optimization algorithms on various problems or benchmarks. With litte programming effort, one can create the problem specific part of an optimisation problem, and combine it with arbitrary ready-to-use, pre-compiled and very complex optimisation search algorithms.

The project "mPOEMS in JAVA" shares the goal of providing an easy-to-use framework, to use complex search algorithms, with PISA. The PISA framework is applicable to almost any search algorithm. mPOEMS in JAVA focus on providing a framework to use the evolutionary algorithm mPOEMS, without the need to know the algorithm in detail.

Getting Started

Best starting point is to read the documentation . The documentation is outdated (a bit) but nevertheless it`s the best starting point you can find ;-) Mainly it should be okay, but at least the settings part was not updated for a while.

To see the framework in action just download the ready-to-start .jars at the downloads tab. There you can find two downloads. A mpoems-in-java solution for the knapsack problem and the .jar for the project selection problem. Get more information about the knapsack problem at wikipedia.

With JAVA installed you can start the .jars with double-clicking on them and waiting for a while, checking out the resulting .xls after a few minutes or you can use this command to see the command-line output:

• java -jar tuwien.ifs.mpoems.knapsackProblem-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar

• java -jar tuwien.ifs.mpoems.ppds.start-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar

Please note that you have to create an output folder for the ppds jar in order to create the output file.

You can also change the settings mpoems-in-java is running with opening the .jar with win rar., change the settings file and then save it.

You can find the settings file in the folder * tuwien.ifs.mpoems.knapsackProblem-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar\tuwien\ifs\mpoems\knapsackProblem\mPOEMSConf.cfg

or

• tuwien.ifs.mpoems.ppds.start-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar\tuwien\ifs\mpoems\ppds\start\mPOEMSConf.cfg

• tuwien.ifs.mpoems.ppds.start-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar\tuwien\ifs\mpoems\ppds\start\projectSelection.cfg

The download section also provides a .txt file with the most common maven commands. These commands should be enough to create an eclipse project out of the source code and get started.

The JAVA implementation of mPOEMS

mPOEMS in JAVA is the generic JAVA implementation of an evolutionary algorithm called Multiobjective Prototype Optimization with Evolved Improvement Steps (mPOEMS). The framework was designed to provide optimisation problem engineers with an interface to use mPOEMS, without detailed understanding of the algorithm.

All needed methods and fields to use the framework are presented in the documentation of the framework which can be found at the following location:

http://thomaskremmel.com/mpoems/mpoems_in_java_documentation.pdf .

Main goal of the framework implementation was the creation of a generic framework, for which problem-dependent parts could be easily attached. The framework was created in close collaboration with Jiri Kubalik, the inventor of mPOEMS, under the observation of Stefan Biffl.

About the authors

Mag. Thomas Kremmel works as an expert for project management and information technology for aeon-group consulting. * http://www.aeon-group.at and http://www.thomaskremmel.com

Dr. Jiří Kubalík is assistant professor at the Department of Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University in Prague: * http://cyber.felk.cvut.cz/people/page.php?id=38&detailed=y

Prof. Dr. Stefan Biffl is associate professor of software engineering at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology. * http://qse.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~biffl/

About projects using the java implementation of mPOEMS

The thesis of the author served as a proof-of-concept for the framework. You can find the thesis here.

• Project Portfolio Decision Support Using Evolutionary Algorithms