A Software Tool for Assisting Experimentation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

In real world, many optimization problems are dynamic, which means that their model elements vary with time. These problems have received increasing attention over time, especially from the viewpoint of metaheuristics methods. In this context, experimentation is a crucial task because of the stochastic nature of both algorithms and problems. Currently, there are several technologieswhose methods, problems, and performancemeasures can be implemented.However, in most of them, certain features thatmake the experimentation process easy are not present. Examples of such features are the statistical analysis of the results and a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows an easy management of the experimentation process. Bearing in mind these limitations, in the present work, we present DynOptLab, a software tool for experimental analysis in dynamic environments. DynOptLab has two main components: (1) an object-oriented framework to facilitate the implementation of new proposals and (2) a graphical user interface for the experiment management and the statistical analysis of the results. With the aim of verifying the benefits of DynOptLab’s main features, a typical case study on experimentation in dynamic environments was carried out.