Evolutionary Dynamic Optimization: Test and Evaluation Environments

In the last two decades, dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) have drawn a lot of research studies from the evolutionary computation (EC) community due to the importance in real-world applications. A variety of evolutionary computation approaches have been developed to address DOPs. In parallel with developing new approaches, many benchmark and real-world DOPs have been constructed and used to compare them under different performance measures. In this chapter, we describe the concept of DOPs and review existing dynamic test problems that are commonly used by researchers to investigate their EC approaches in the literature. Some discussions regarding the major features of existing dynamic test environments are presented. Typical dynamic benchmark problems and real-world DOPs are described in detail. We also review the performance measures that are widely used by researchers to evaluate and compare their developed EC approaches for DOPs. Suggestions are also given for potential improvement regarding dynamic test and evaluation environments for the EC community.