Evo-Panel: Dynamic Visualization Tool for Optimization Process

This article for the Hot-off-the-Press track at GECCO 2024 summarizes recent work titled 'Evo-Panel: Dynamic Visualization Tool for Optimization Process', published in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence [4]. We believe this work is of interest to the GECCO community as it represents the first attempt to establish a comprehensive dynamic visualization tool, Evo-Panel, capable of directly and flexibly illustrating the detailed procedures of metaheuristics and optimization methods in solving numerical benchmark functions. The objective of Evo-Panel is to help users identify the influence of the design formulas, operations, and parameters on the capabilities and performances of the algorithms. Using Evo-Panel, users can trace each movement, intuitively observe the process, and interpret the processes related to evolutionary algorithms (EAs), which are important to explainable AI. Moreover, Evo-Panel can perform a comparative analysis to illustrate the differences between algorithms. The case study results demonstrate that employing Evo-Panel enables professors to explain optimization algorithms visually engagingly and enhances the students' understanding of EAs. The tool can promote CI-related education from teaching and learning perspectives. Furthermore, researchers can use it to obtain information for analysis, facilitate debugging, verify design ideas, gain insights into the process, and improve the design of EAs.