WCCI & GECCO Competition: How to plan work in factories smarter?

Dr. Michael Hellwig's Josef Ressel Center for Robust Decisions is represented with a competition on production planning under uncertainty and two research papers at two top international conferences: ACM GECCO 2026 (San Jose, CR) and IEEE WCCI 2026 (Maastricht, NL). The competition is aimed at developers of solutions for better work plans in production environments. There, people with different skills work on many different machines. Some are faster, some are slower. This is exactly what makes planning difficult. To ensure that everything remains realistic, there are two variants: fixed times (the work duration always remains the same) and unclear times (the duration can change because people do not work at the same speed every day). Research and Engineering and Technology teams use modern, intelligent algorithms that are often based on nature - for example, animal swarming behavior or biological evolution. These methods are particularly suitable when problems are very complicated. The competition provides 30 different tasks and a simulation environment in Python. This allows all teams to test and compare their solutions fairly. In the end, the research community wins: it learns which methods are really strong today and how factories can be planned even better in the future.