The BENCH@GECCO Workshop Series 

A platform to come together and to discuss recent progress and challenges in the area of benchmarking optimization heuristics. 

This workshop will continue our workshop series that we started in 2020. The core theme is on benchmarking evolutionary computation methods and related sampling-based optimization heuristics, but each year, we will change the focus. 

For GECCO 2026, our focus will be on “Challenges in benchmarking dynamic optimisation problems”.

Many problems in the real-world are dynamic in some way. The decision maker could change their opinion, thus modifying the objective function(s). The availability of materials might change, thus varying the constraints/requirements. The environment might heat up, thus influencing the dynamics of a fluid simulation. Such changing environments can be observed between optimisation runs or even during one run.

While some dynamic problems have been addressed in the past, and some benchmarks exist, only very few types of dynamics are covered at relatively low complexity. Therefore, we propose to organise this workshop to create an overview of the current state of existing benchmarking problems and evaluation measures, and agree on future steps to take for a consolidated effort towards a common benchmark to better streamline this area of research.

We will be addressing the following questions:

• What are conceptual differences between benchmarking for static and dynamic environments?

• What are the recent trends and open issues emerging from the recent TEVC special issue on Evolutionary Dynamic Optimization?

• Which different types of dynamic problems are common in real-world applications and in research, and how are they benchmarked?

• Are performance measures from transfer learning applicable (jumpstart, transfer ratio, time to threshold etc)?