Experiences With Teaching Adaptive Optimization to Engineering Graduate Students

This paper discusses the first-hand experiences of the author in developing and teaching a graduate level engineering course in adaptive optimization methods inspired by nature. The paper discusses course content, textbooks and supplementary written material, software and computer projects, and grading and evaluation. This course has encouraged many students to pursue research in evolutionary computation, tabu search or simulated annealing, however it is continually being modified to reflect the many changes occurring in the field. 1 Introduction The advent of new computational techniques inspired by nature has resulted in the publication of many new books and journals, new organizations and conferences, and a new group of graduate students who want to learn about these techniques. Developing new courses at the graduate level is time consuming and challenging. For new courses in evolutionary computation and other adaptive optimization methods inspired by nature, development is compli..