Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The 6-minute introduction to FREVO

Evolution is a slow process. In earth history, evolution took millions of years to achieve something. Computer simulations of evolutionary processes are much better, but still taking weeks of simulation time on a cluster to run some evolutionary algorithm.

We challenge this!

Our software FREVO (FRamework for EVOlutionary design) is aimed to reduce the time to implement, set up and run an evolutionary algorithm to evolve an agent's behavior as a solution to a particular control problem. FREVO is decomposing the task into problem definition, solution representation and the optimization method, in order to ... let's stop talking! I will show you in just 6 minutes!

As demonstrated in the video below, 6 minutes are sufficient to download the framework, install it, set up a simulation, evolve a neural network controller for an inverted pendulum problem and check the results! See for yourself!



The tool is available at http://frevo.sourceforge.com
There are also tutorials on advanced projects with FREVO. If you are doing research in engineering complex systems, this tool might be useful for your thesis ;-)

If FREVO is useful for you, please cite this paper:

A. Sobe, I. Fehérvári, and W. Elmenreich. Frevo: A tool for evolving and evaluating self-organizing systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Evaluation for Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Lyon, France, September 2012.