Bridging Theory and Practice Through Modular Graphical User Interfaces

State-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms and related search heuristics are well suited to solve problems from industry. Unfortunately, easy to use graphical user interfaces (GUI) are not available for many algorithms. We claim that the availability of well-designed GUIs might increase the acceptance of these algorithms in the real-world domain. The spotGUI R-package, which is introduced in this paper, provides a GUI for the already well-established SPOT package. It includes state-of-the-art algorithms and modeling techniques that can be used without the requirement of optimization or programming knowledge. Using the spotGUI in industry, as well as education, delivered first promising results.