The Department of Energy will host the third edition of the PhD ELT Course “Evolutionary Multi-Criteria Optimisation and Decision-Making” from 2 to 6 March 2026.

The course will be taught by Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb, University Distinguished Professor and Koenig Endowed Chair Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Michigan State University

The course covers the foundational concepts and practical aspects of solving problems with multiple objectives, engaging participants with topics such as:
– Principles of multi-objective optimisation;
– An introduction to evolutionary algorithms, including NSGA-II and NSGA-III.
– Approaches to multi-criterion decision-making.
– Applications in various scientific and engineering domains.

Course Objectives:

Most engineering and applied problems involve multiple conflicting objectives, however due to lack of knowledge, multiple objectives are usually scalarized into a single objective and solved using a single-objective optimization method. Multi-objective problems give rise to a set of trade-off Pareto-optimal solutions which then require a decision- making method to analyze the solutions to choose a single preferred solution. Although multi-objective studies date back to early seventies, the suggestion of evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) methods in early nineties have revolutionized the way these problems are solved. In this course, principles of multi-objective optimization, evolutionary methods, recent developments, multi-criterion decision-making, and applications will be covered.

This five-day course will introduce basics of optimization, classical methods, and recent evolutionary optimization methods systematically and with hands-on exercises. After building the foundation on single-objective optimization methods, multi-criterion search and optimization basics and methods will be introduced with a focus on evolutionary methods, known as EMO methods. Starting in early nineties, EMO methods have quickly become standard in solving multi-criterion problems. Thereafter, the choice of a single Pareto-optimal solution using classical and evolutionary multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) methods will be introduced. Finally, a number of advanced research topics will be presented to provide students new and innovative potential research ideas. No knowledge on optimization is required.

Bio-sketch of Instructor:
Kalyanmoy Deb is University Distinguished Professor and Koenig Endowed Chair Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Michigan State University, USA. Prof. Deb’s research interests are in evolutionary optimization and their application in multi-criterion optimization, modeling, and machine learning. He has been a visiting professor at various universities across the world including University of Skövde in Sweden, Aalto University in Finland, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and IITs in India. He was awarded IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award for his sustained work in EMO, Infosys Prize, TWAS Prize in Engineering Sciences, CajAstur Mamdani Prize, Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Kharagpur, Edgeworth-Pareto award, Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences, and Bessel Research award from Germany. He is fellow of ACM, IEEE, ASME, and three Indian science and engineering academies. He has published over 620 research papers with Google Scholar citation of over 197,000 with h-index 138. He is in the editorial board on 10 major international journals. More information about his research contribution can be found from https://www.coin-lab.org.