Scope 

The purpose of this special session is to promote the design, study, and validation of generic approaches for solving multi-objective optimization problems based on the concept of decomposition. Decomposition-based Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization (DEMO) encompasses any technique, concept, or framework that takes inspiration from the “divide and conquer” paradigm, by essentially breaking a multi-objective optimization problem into several sub-problems for which solutions for the original global problem are computed and aggregated in a cooperative manner. This simple idea, which is rather standard in computer science and information systems, allows us to open up new exciting research perspectives and challenges both at the fundamental level of our understanding of multi-objective problems and in terms of designing and implementing new efficient algorithms for solving them. Generally speaking, the special session will focus on stochastic evolutionary approaches for which decomposition is performed with respect to the objective space, typically by means of scalarizing functions like in the MOEA/D framework. We, however, encourage contributions reporting advances with respect to other decomposition techniques operating in the decision space as done in the co-called cone-separation methods; or other hybrid approaches taking inspiration from operations research and mathematical programming. In fact, many different DMOEAs variants have been proposed, studied and applied to various application domains in recent years. However, DMOEAs are still in their very early infancy, since only a few basic design principles have been established compared to the huge body of literature dedicated to other well-established approaches (e.g. Pareto ranking, indicator-based techniques, etc), and relatively few research forums have been dedicated to the study of DEMO approaches and their unification. The main goal of the proposed session is to encourage research studies that systematically investigate the critical issues in DMOEAs at the aim of understanding their key ingredients and their main dynamics, as well a to develop solid and generic principles for designing them. The long-term goal is to contribute to the emergence of a general and unified methodology for the design, tuning, and performance assessment of DMOEAs.

The special session will be a nice opportunity for researchers in the evolutionary and multiobjective optimization field to exchange their recent ideas and advances on the design and analysis of DEMO approaches. In this respect, we are welcoming high-quality papers in theoretical, developmental, implementational, and applied aspects of DEMO approaches. More particularly, the special session will encourage original research contributions that address new and existing DMOEAs, their contributions and relationships to other methodologies dedicated to multi-objective optimization in terms of algorithmic components, decomposition strategies, collaboration among different search procedures, design of new specialized search procedures, parallel and distributed implementations, incorporation of user interaction, combination and hybridization with other traditional (heuristic or exact) techniques, strategies for dealing with many objectives, noisy problems, and expensive problems, problem solving and applications, etc. The main focus will be on eliciting the main design principles that lead to effective and efficient cooperative search procedures among the so-defined single or multiple objective subproblems.

Important Dates:

Paper submission: January 15, 2025

Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2025

Final paper submission: May 1, 2025

The submission procedure, deadlines, and paper format are the same as the CEC'2025 leading conference. In particular, we recall that papers must be submitted through the IEEE CEC 2025 online submission system while selecting the ADEMO special session under the list of research topics in the submission system.