Lorentz Center in Leiden hosts the MACODA Workshop

The Many Criteria Optimization and Decision Analysis (MACODA) workshop, organized by a team of successful researcher and scientists in the field of multi and many obejctive optimization was held from Monday 16 September through Friday 20 September 2019 in Leiden.

The motivated participants of this workshop including early stage researchers, post docs, professors and several researchers working in industry all had a shared goal and that was to address this question: "How should we use computational support to deal with problems with many objectives?" This question is crucially important, as the real-world optimization problems can often be formulated as multi or many objective optimization tasks.

The first day of the workshop belonged to several interesting talks given by pioneers in the field of many and multi-objective optimization, Prof. Hisao Ishibuchi and Prof. Miettinnen. Also, the early stage researchers found the opportunity to share their recent works. From the very first day participants found time and opportunity to discuss different topics and challenges in the field. The atmosphere of sharing and learning from each other got even better as we started with the open space workshop model on the second day. In this form of workshops everybody is invited to come up with topics that have a high importance to discuss with the community. Everyone who comes up with a topic can write it on a card and attach it to the wall in a specific cell showing a specific time slot and room. This is an official invitation to the rest of the participants to join the discussion if it is of their interest. Every discussion was documented.

In the course of the workshop a lot of existing challenges in the field along with possible cures were discussed. Some of the groups ended up finalizing their work with a plan for future collaborations in form of a paper or a project.