Towards an analysis of dynamic environments

Although the interest in nature-inspired optimization of dynamic problems has been growing constantly over the past decade, very little has been done to analyze and characterize a changing fitness landscape. However, it would be very helpful for algorithm development to have a better understanding of the nature of fitness changes in dynamic real-world problems. In this paper, we propose a number of measures that can be used to analyze and characterize the dynamism in a problem changing over time. Additionally, we introduce a new dynamic multi-dimensional knapsack problem as a close-to-real-world test problem.