PISA - a platform and programming language independent interface for search algorithms

This paper introduces a text based interface (PISA) that allows to separate the algorithm-specific part of an optimizer from the application-specific part. These parts are implemented as independent programs forming freelycombinable modules. It is therefore possible to provide these modules as ready-to-use packages. As a result, an application engineer can easilyexchange the optimization method and trydifferent variants, while an algorithm designer has the opportunityto test a search algorithm on various problems without additional programming effort