Dynamic Time-Linkage Problems - The Challenges

Dynamic time-linkage optimisation problems (DTPs) are special dynamic optimisation problems (DOPs) where the current solutions chosen by the solver can influence how the problems might change in the future. Although DTPs are very common in real-world applications, they have received very little attention from the fleld of evolutionary and meta-heuristic optimisation. Due to this lack of research there are still many characteristics that we do not fully know about DTPs. For example, is there any characteristics of DTPs that we do not know; with these characteristics are DTPs still solvable; and what is the appropriate strategy to solve them. In this paper these issues will be partially addressed. First, we will identify a new and challenging class of DTPs where it might not be possible to solve the problems using traditional methods. Second, an approach to solve this class of problems under certain circumstances will be suggested and experiments to verify the hypothesis will be carried out. Two test problems will be proposed to simulate the property of this new class of DTPs, and discussions of real-world applications will be introduced.