Hans-Paul Schwefel

Hans-Paul Schwefel (born December 4, 1940 in Berlin) is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at University of Dortmund (now Dortmund University of Technology), where he held the chair of systems analysis from 1985 until 2006. He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation and one of the authors responsible for the evolution strategy ("Evolutionsstrategie"). His work has helped to understand the dynamics of evolutionary algorithms and to put evolutionary computation on formal grounds.

He attended the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) and graduated as an aerospace engineer in 1965 and got his PhD. in 1975. While as a student at TUB, he met Ingo Rechenberg in November 1963. His initial work had nothing to do with cybernetics, bionics, or optimization itself. Both of them were studying different subjects at the time. Rechenberg was dealing with wall shear stress measurements and Schwefel was responsible for organizing fluid dynamics execises for other students.

While attending the Hermann-Föttinger Institute for Hydrodynamics (HFI) at TUB, he and Rechenberg began performing fluid dynamics experiments upon wings, kinked plates, and other objects related to aerodynamics. The main objetive of those experiments were concerned to optimizing the object shape and/or parameters through small modifications on the real object, a "technique" they called "experimental optimization", in order to reduce the drag, increase the thrust, and so on. Applying classical optimization methods (such as Gauss–Seidel and gradient-based techniques) on such experiments showed that those methods are not well suited to be adopted in "experimental optimization", mainly due to noisy measurements and/or multimodality. They realized modifying all the variables at same time via a random manner (e.g., small modifications are more frequent than larger ones). This was the seminal idea to bring to light the evolution strategy, which was initially used on a discrete problem (optimization of a kinked plate in a wind tunnel) and was handled without computers.

Some time later, Schwefel was responsible for structuring the evolution strategy to deal with numerical/parametric optimization and, also, has helped to formalize it as it is known nowadays.

References

* Beyer, H.-G. (2001). The Theory of Evolution Strategies. Natural Computing Series. Springer, Berlin 2001.
* Beyer, H.-G. and Schwefel, H.-P. (2002). Evolution Strategies: A Comprehensive Introduction. In Natural Computing, 1(1):3-52.
* Hans-Paul Schwefel's [http://ls11-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/people/schwefel/cvE.html Curriculum Vitae]
* Hans-Paul Schwefel: Cybernetic Evolution as Strategy for Experimental Research in Fluid Mechanics (in German). Diploma Thesis, Hermann-Föttinger Institute for Fluid Mechanics, Technical University Berlin, March 1965.
* Ingo Rechenberg: Evolutionsstrategie '94. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog 1994.

External links

* [http://ls11-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/people/schwefel/WelcomeE.html Hans-Paul Schwefel's Webpage]
* [http://ls11-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/index.jsp?userLanguage=en Chair of Algorithm Engineering (former Systems Analysis)]