In May, the second edition of the course “Evolutionary Multi-Criteria Optimisation and Decision-Making” was held, an integral part of the Doctoral Programme in Electrical Engineering, coordinated by the Department of Energy at Politecnico di Milano.

The initiative saw the extraordinary participation of Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb, one of the leading international experts in the field of evolutionary optimisation and multi-objective decision-making, who shared his knowledge and expertise with our PhD students.

Kalyanmoy Deb is a professor at Michigan State University (USA) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. He is director of the Computational Optimisation and Innovation (COIN) Laboratory and previously founded and directed the Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL) at the Indian Institute of Technology di Kanpur, India.

A leading author in the field of multi-objective optimisation, Deb published the book “Multi-Objective Optimization using Evolutionary Algorithms” (Wiley) in 2001, which has become an academic reference point. Among the many awards he has received, the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award (2018) stands out for his pioneering contribution to multi-objective evolutionary optimisation, the Thomson Citation Laureate Award (1996–2005) for the most cited research in computer science, the MCDM Edgeworth-Pareto Award (2008) for his fundamental contributions to multi-criteria decision-making, and the prestigious World Academy of Sciences Prize in Engineering Sciences (2013).

During the course, participants had the opportunity to explore:

• The principles of multi-objective optimisation;
• The basics of evolutionary algorithms, with a focus on NSGA-II and NSGA-III;
• Methodologies for multi-criteria decision-making;
• Applications in various scientific and engineering fields.

The training experience proved to be an important growth opportunity for our PhD students, who will be able to apply the skills they acquired in their research activities. The Department of Energy would like to thank Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb for his valuable contribution and the Faculty of the PhD Programme in Electrical Engineering for making it possible.