Identifying Properties of Real-World Optimisation Problems through a Questionnaire

Understand

Optimisation algorithms are commonly compared on benchmarks to get insight into performance differences.

• However, it is not clear how closely benchmarks match the properties of real-world problems because these properties are largely unknown.
• This work investigates the properties of real-world problems through a questionnaire to enable the design of future benchmark problems that more closely resemble those found in the real world.
• The results, while not representative as they are based on only 45 responses, indicate that many problems possess at least one of the following properties: they are constrained, deterministic, have only continuous variables, require substantial computation times for both the objectives and the constraints, or allow a limited number of evaluations.