TY - CONF T1 - SANComSim: A Scalable, Adaptive and Non-intrusive Framework to Optimize Performance in Computational Science Applications T2 - ICCS Y1 - 2013 A1 - Alberto Nuñez A1 - Rosa Filgueira A1 - Mercedes G. Merayo JF - ICCS ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Sharing and Reuse in Knowledge Discovery T2 - THE DATA BONANZA: Improving Knowledge Discovery for Science, Engineering and Business Y1 - 2013 A1 - Oscar Corcho ED - Malcolm Atkinson ED - Rob Baxter ED - Peter Brezany ED - Oscar Corcho ED - Michelle Galea ED - Parsons, Mark ED - Snelling, David ED - van Hemert, Jano KW - Data-Intensive Analysis KW - Knowledge Discovery KW - Ontologies KW - Semantic Web KW - Sharing AB - Chapter 8: "Sharing and re-use in knowledge discovery", introduces more advanced knowledge discovery problems, and shows how improved component and pattern descriptions facilitate re-use. This supports the assembly of libraries of high level components well-adapted to classes of knowledge discovery methods or application domains. The descriptions are made more powerful by introducing notations from the semantic Web. JF - THE DATA BONANZA: Improving Knowledge Discovery for Science, Engineering and Business PB - John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ER - TY - CONF T1 - A Science Gateway Getting Ready for Serving the International Molecular Simulation Community T2 - Proceedings of Science Y1 - 2012 A1 - Gesing, Sandra A1 - Herres-Pawlis, Sonja A1 - Birkenheuer, Georg A1 - Brinkmann, André A1 - Grunzke, Richard A1 - Kacsuk, Peter A1 - Kohlbacher, Oliver A1 - Kozlovszky, Miklos A1 - Krüger, Jens A1 - Müller-Pfefferkorn, Ralph A1 - Schäfer, Patrick A1 - Steinke, Thomas JF - Proceedings of Science ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Searching in peer-to-peer networks JF - Computer Science Review (Elsevier) Y1 - 2012 A1 - I.A. Klampanos A1 - J.M. Jose UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574013712000238 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - SIMCAN: A flexible, scalable and expandable simulation platform for modelling and simulating distributed architectures and applications JF - Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory Y1 - 2012 A1 - Alberto Nuñez A1 - Javier Fernández A1 - Rosa Filgueira A1 - Félix García Carballeira A1 - Jesús Carretero VL - 20 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - A Single Sign-On Infrastructure for Science Gateways on a Use Case for Structural Bioinformatics JF - Journal of Grid Computing Y1 - 2012 A1 - Gesing, Sandra A1 - Grunzke, Richard A1 - Krüger, Jens A1 - Birkenheuer, Georg A1 - Wewior, Martin A1 - Schäfer, Patrick A1 - Schuller, Bernd A1 - Schuster, Johannes A1 - Herres-Pawlis, Sonja A1 - Breuers, Sebastian A1 - Balaskó, Ákos A1 - Kozlovszky, Miklos A1 - Fabri, AnnaSzikszay A1 - Packschies, Lars A1 - Kacsuk, Peter A1 - Blunk, Dirk A1 - Steinke, Thomas A1 - Brinkmann, André A1 - Fels, Gregor A1 - Müller-Pfefferkorn, Ralph A1 - Jäkel, René A1 - Kohlbacher, Oliver KW - DCIs KW - Science gateway KW - security KW - Single sign-on KW - Structural bioinformatics VL - 10 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10723-012-9247-y ER - TY - CONF T1 - A Science Gateway for Molecular Simulations T2 - EGI User Forum 2011 Y1 - 2011 A1 - Gesing, Sandra A1 - Kacsuk, Peter A1 - Kozlovszky, Miklos A1 - Birkenheuer, Georg A1 - Blunk, Dirk A1 - Breuers, Sebastian A1 - Brinkmann, André A1 - Fels, Gregor A1 - Grunzke, Richard A1 - Herres-Pawlis, Sonja A1 - Krüger, Jens A1 - Packschies, Lars A1 - Müller-Pfefferkorn, Ralph A1 - Schäfer, Patrick A1 - Steinke, Thomas A1 - Szikszay Fabri, Anna A1 - Warzecha, Klaus A1 - Wewior, Martin A1 - Kohlbacher, Oliver JF - EGI User Forum 2011 SN - 978 90 816927 1 7 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Special Issue: Portals for life sciences---Providing intuitive access to bioinformatic tools JF - Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Y1 - 2011 A1 - Gesing, Sandra A1 - van Hemert, J. A1 - Kacsuk, P. A1 - Kohlbacher, O. AB - The topic ‘Portals for life sciences’ includes various research fields, on the one hand many different topics out of life sciences, e.g. mass spectrometry, on the other hand portal technologies and different aspects of computer science, such as usability of user interfaces and security of systems. The main aspect about portals is to simplify the user’s interaction with computational resources that are concerted to a supported application domain. PB - Wiley VL - 23 IS - 23 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Statistical aspects of quantitative real-time PCR experiment design JF - Methods Y1 - 2010 A1 - Robert R. Kitchen A1 - Kubista, Mikael A1 - Tichopad, Ales KW - Error propagation KW - Experiment design KW - Gene expression KW - Nested analysis of variance KW - powerNest KW - Prospective power analysis KW - qPCR KW - Real-time PCR KW - Sampling plan KW - Statistical power AB - Experiments using quantitative real-time PCR to test hypotheses are limited by technical and biological variability; we seek to minimise sources of confounding variability through optimum use of biological and technical replicates. The quality of an experiment design is commonly assessed by calculating its prospective power. Such calculations rely on knowledge of the expected variances of the measurements of each group of samples and the magnitude of the treatment effect; the estimation of which is often uninformed and unreliable. Here we introduce a method that exploits a small pilot study to estimate the biological and technical variances in order to improve the design of a subsequent large experiment. We measure the variance contributions at several ‘levels’ of the experiment design and provide a means of using this information to predict both the total variance and the prospective power of the assay. A validation of the method is provided through a variance analysis of representative genes in several bovine tissue-types. We also discuss the effect of normalisation to a reference gene in terms of the measured variance components of the gene of interest. Finally, we describe a software implementation of these methods, powerNest, that gives the user the opportunity to input data from a pilot study and interactively modify the design of the assay. The software automatically calculates expected variances, statistical power, and optimal design of the larger experiment. powerNest enables the researcher to minimise the total confounding variance and maximise prospective power for a specified maximum cost for the large study. PB - Elsevier VL - 50 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=GatewayURL&_method=citationSearch&_uoikey=B6WN5-4Y88DBN-1&_origin=SDEMFRHTML&_version=1&md5=7bb0b5b797d6e1f7c5c2df478fc88e5a IS - 4 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Simultaneous alignment of short reads against multiple genomes JF - Genome Biol Y1 - 2009 A1 - Schneeberger, Korbinian A1 - Hagmann, Jörg A1 - Ossowski, Stephan A1 - Warthmann, Norman A1 - Gesing, Sandra A1 - Kohlbacher, Oliver A1 - Weigel, Detlef VL - 10 UR - http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/Simultaneous-alignment-short-reads-against/19761611.html ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Strategies and Policies to Support and Advance Education in e-Science JF - Computing Now Y1 - 2009 A1 - Malcolm Atkinson A1 - Elizabeth Vander Meer A1 - Fergusson, David A1 - Clive Davenhall A1 - Hamza Mehammed AB - In previous installments of this series, we’ve presented tools and resources that university undergraduate and graduate environments must provide to allow for the continued development and success of e-Science education. We’ve introduced related summer (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/ 10.1109/MDSO.2008.20) and winter (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MDSO.2008.26) schools and important issues such as t-Infrastructure provision (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/ 10.1109/MDSO.2008.28), intellectual property rights in the context of digital repositories (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MDSO.2008.34), and curriculum content (http://www2. computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/0309/education). We conclude now with an overview of areas in which we must focus effort and strategies and policies that could provide much-needed support in these areas. We direct these strategy and policy recommendations toward key stakeholders in e-Science education, such as ministries of education, councils in professional societies, and professional teachers and educational strategists. Ministries of education can influence funding councils, thus financially supporting our proposals. Professional societies can assist in curricula revision, and teachers and strategists shape curricula in institutions, which makes them valuable in improving and developing education in e-Science and (perhaps) e-Science in education. We envision incremental change in curricula, so our proposals aim to evolve existing courses, rather than suggesting drastic upheavals and isolated additions. The long-term goal is to ensure that every graduate obtains the appropriate level of e-Science competency for their field, but we don’t presume to define that level for any given discipline or institution. We set out issues and ideas but don’t offer rigid prescriptions, which would take control away from important stakeholders. UR - http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/education ER - TY - JOUR T1 - A Strategy for Research and Innovation in the Century of Information JF - Prometheus Y1 - 2009 A1 - e-Science Directors’ Forum Strategy Working Group A1 - Atkinson, M. A1 - Britton, D. A1 - Coveney, P. A1 - De Roure, D A1 - Garnett, N. A1 - Geddes, N. A1 - Gurney, R. A1 - Haines, K. A1 - Hughes, L. A1 - Ingram, D. A1 - Jeffreys, P. A1 - Lyon, L. A1 - Osborne, I. A1 - Perrott, P. A1 - Procter. R. A1 - Rusbridge, C. AB - More data will be produced in the next five years than in the entire history of human kind, a digital deluge that marks the beginning of the Century of Information. Through a year‐long consultation with UK researchers, a coherent strategy has been developed, which will nurture Century‐of‐Information Research (CIR); it crystallises the ideas developed by the e‐Science Directors’ Forum Strategy Working Group. This paper is an abridged version of their latest report which can be found at: http://wikis.nesc.ac.uk/escienvoy/Century_of_Information_Research_Strategy which also records the consultation process and the affiliations of the authors. This document is derived from a paper presented at the Oxford e‐Research Conference 2008 and takes into account suggestions made in the ensuing panel discussion. The goals of the CIR Strategy are to facilitate the growth of UK research and innovation that is data and computationally intensive and to develop a new culture of ‘digital‐systems judgement’ that will equip research communities, businesses, government and society as a whole, with the skills essential to compete and prosper in the Century of Information. The CIR Strategy identifies a national requirement for a balanced programme of coordination, research, infrastructure, translational investment and education to empower UK researchers, industry, government and society. The Strategy is designed to deliver an environment which meets the needs of UK researchers so that they can respond agilely to challenges, can create knowledge and skills, and can lead new kinds of research. It is a call to action for those engaged in research, those providing data and computational facilities, those governing research and those shaping education policies. The ultimate aim is to help researchers strengthen the international competitiveness of the UK research base and increase its contribution to the economy. The objectives of the Strategy are to better enable UK researchers across all disciplines to contribute world‐leading fundamental research; to accelerate the translation of research into practice; and to develop improved capabilities, facilities and context for research and innovation. It envisages a culture that is better able to grasp the opportunities provided by the growing wealth of digital information. Computing has, of course, already become a fundamental tool in all research disciplines. The UK e‐Science programme (2001–06)—since emulated internationally—pioneered the invention and use of new research methods, and a new wave of innovations in digital‐information technologies which have enabled them. The Strategy argues that the UK must now harness and leverage its own, plus the now global, investment in digital‐information technology in order to spread the benefits as widely as possible in research, education, industry and government. Implementing the Strategy would deliver the computational infrastructure and its benefits as envisaged in the Science & Innovation Investment Framework 2004–2014 (July 2004), and in the reports developing those proposals. To achieve this, the Strategy proposes the following actions: 1. support the continuous innovation of digital‐information research methods; 2. provide easily used, pervasive and sustained e‐Infrastructure for all research; 3. enlarge the productive research community which exploits the new methods efficiently; 4. generate capacity, propagate knowledge and develop skills via new curricula; and 5. develop coordination mechanisms to improve the opportunities for interdisciplinary research and to make digital‐infrastructure provision more cost effective. To gain the best value for money strategic coordination is required across a broad spectrum of stakeholders. A coherent strategy is essential in order to establish and sustain the UK as an international leader of well‐curated national data assets and computational infrastructure, which is expertly used to shape policy, support decisions, empower researchers and to roll out the results to the wider benefit of society. The value of data as a foundation for wellbeing and a sustainable society must be appreciated; national resources must be more wisely directed to the collection, curation, discovery, widening access, analysis and exploitation of these data. Every researcher must be able to draw on skills, tools and computational resources to develop insights, test hypotheses and translate inventions into productive use, or to extract knowledge in support of governmental decision making. This foundation plus the skills developed will launch significant advances in research, in business, in professional practice and in government with many consequent benefits for UK citizens. The Strategy presented here addresses these complex and interlocking requirements. VL - 27 ER - TY - CONF T1 - Scientific Workflow: A Survey and Research Directions T2 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science Y1 - 2008 A1 - Barker, Adam A1 - van Hemert, Jano KW - e-Science KW - workflow AB - Workflow technologies are emerging as the dominant approach to coordinate groups of distributed services. However with a space filled with competing specifications, standards and frameworks from multiple domains, choosing the right tool for the job is not always a straightforward task. Researchers are often unaware of the range of technology that already exists and focus on implementing yet another proprietary workflow system. As an antidote to this common problem, this paper presents a concise survey of existing workflow technology from the business and scientific domain and makes a number of key suggestions towards the future development of scientific workflow systems. JF - Lecture Notes in Computer Science PB - Springer VL - 4967 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68111-3_78 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - The Self-adaptation to dynamic failures for efficient Virtual Organization formation in Grid computing context JF - Chaos, Solitons and Fractals Y1 - 2008 A1 - Liangxiu Han KW - complex network system KW - failure recovery KW - graph theory KW - grid computing KW - virtual organization formation AB - Grid computing aims to enable “resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional Virtual Organizations (VOs)”. However, due to the nature of heterogeneous and dynamic resources, dynamic failures in the distributed grid environment usually occur more than in traditional computation platforms, which cause failed VO formations. In this paper, we develop a novel self-adaptive mechanism to dynamic failures during VO formations. Such a self-adaptive scheme allows an individual and member of VOs to automatically find other available or replaceable one once a failure happens and therefore makes systems automatically recover from dynamic failures. We define dynamic failure situations of a system by using two standard indicators: Mean Time between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR). We model both MTBF and MTTR as Poisson distributions. We investigate and analyze the efficiency of the proposed self-adaptation mechanism to dynamic failures by comparing the success probability of VO formations before and after adopting it in three different cases: 1) different failure situations; 2) different organizational structures and scales; 3) different task complexities. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can automatically adapt to dynamic failures and effectively improve the dynamic VO formation performance in the event of node failures, which provide a valuable addition to the field. PB - Elsevier Science ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Semantic-Supported and Agent-Based Decentralized Grid Resource Discovery JF - Future Generation Computer Systems Y1 - 2008 A1 - Liangxiu Han A1 - Dave Berry KW - grid resource discovery, decentralization, agent, semantic similarity, ontology AB - One of open issues in grid computing is efficient resource discovery. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic-supported and agent-based decentralized grid resource discovery mechanism. Without overhead of negotiation, the algorithm allows individual resource agents to semantically interact with neighbour agents based on local knowledge and dynamically form a resource service chain to complete a task. The algorithm ensures resource agent’s ability to cooperate and coordinate on neighbour knowledge requisition for flexible problem solving. The developed algorithm is evaluated by investigating the relationship between the success probability of resource discovery and semantic similarity under different factors. The experiments show the algorithm could flexibly and dynamically discover resources and therefore provide a valuable addition to the field. PB - ScienceDirect VL - 24 IS - 8 ER - TY - Generic T1 - Special Issue: Selected Papers from the 2004 U.K. e-Science All Hands Meeting T2 - All Hands Meeting 2004 Y1 - 2007 A1 - Walker, D. W. A1 - Atkinson, M. P. A1 - Sommerville, I. ED - Walker, D. W. ED - Atkinson, M. P. ED - Sommerville, I. JF - All Hands Meeting 2004 T3 - Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience PB - John Wiley & Sons Ltd CY - Nottingham, UK VL - 19 ER - TY - CONF T1 - Study of User Priorities for e-Infrastructure for e-Research (SUPER) T2 - Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting Y1 - 2007 A1 - Newhouse, S. A1 - Schopf, J. M. A1 - Richards, A. A1 - Atkinson, M. P. JF - Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting ER - TY - CONF T1 - A Shibboleth-Protected Privilege Management Infrastructure for e-Science Education T2 - Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2006 Y1 - 2006 A1 - J. Watt A1 - Oluwafemi Ajayi A1 - J. Jiang A1 - Jos Koetsier A1 - Richard O. Sinnott KW - security JF - Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2006 PB - IEEE Computer Society CY - Singapore ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Specifying use case behavior with interaction models JF - Journal of Object Technology Y1 - 2005 A1 - José Daniel Garcia A1 - Jesús Carretero A1 - José Maria Pérez A1 - Félix García Carballeira A1 - Rosa Filgueira VL - 4 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Specifying use case behavior with interaction models JF - Journal of Object Technology Y1 - 2005 A1 - José Daniel García,Jesús Carretero,José María Pérez,Félix García,Rosa Filgueira. AB - Functional requirements for information systems can be modeled through use cases. Furthermore, use case models have been successfully used in broader contexts than software engineering, as systems engineering. Even if small systems may be modeled as a set of use cases, when large systems requirements are modeled with a plain use case model several difficulties arise. Traditionally, the behavior of use cases has been modeled through textual specifications. In this paper we present an alternate approach based on interaction modeling. The behavior modeling has two variants (one for UML 1.x and one for UML 2.0). We also integrate our behavior modeling with standard use case relationships. VL - 4 IS - 9 ER - TY - RPRT T1 - SPLAT: (Suffix-tree Powered Local Alignment Tool): A Full-Sensitivity Protein Database Search Program that Accelerates the Smith-Waterman Algorithm using a Generalised Suffix Tree Index. Y1 - 2004 A1 - Harding, N. J. A1 - Atkinson, M. P. JF - Department of Computer Science (DCS Tech Report TR-2003-141) PB - University of Glasgow ER - TY - CONF T1 - A Study into Ant Colony Optimization, Evolutionary Computation and Constraint Programming on Binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems T2 - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science Y1 - 2004 A1 - van Hemert, J. I. A1 - Solnon, C. ED - J. Gottlieb ED - G. Raidl KW - ant colony optimisation KW - constraint programming KW - constraint satisfaction KW - evolutionary computation AB - We compare two heuristic approaches, evolutionary computation and ant colony optimisation, and a complete tree-search approach, constraint programming, for solving binary constraint satisfaction problems. We experimentally show that, if evolutionary computation is far from being able to compete with the two other approaches, ant colony optimisation nearly always succeeds in finding a solution, so that it can actually compete with constraint programming. The resampling ratio is used to provide insight into heuristic algorithms performances. Regarding efficiency, we show that if constraint programming is the fastest when instances have a low number of variables, ant colony optimisation becomes faster when increasing the number of variables. JF - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science PB - Springer-Verlag, Berlin SN - 3-540-21367-8 ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Scalable and Recoverable Implementation of Object Evolution for the PJama1 Platform T2 - Persistent Object Systems: Design, Implementation, and Use 9th International Workshop, POS-9 Lillehammer, Norway, September 6–8, 2000 Revised Papers Y1 - 2001 A1 - Atkinson, M. P. A1 - Dmitriev, M. A. A1 - Hamilton, C. A1 - Printezis, T. ED - Graham N. C. ED - Kirby, Alan Dearle ED - Dag I. K. Sjøberg AB - PJama1 is the latest version of an orthogonally persistent platform for Java. It depends on a new persistent object store, Sphere, and provides facilities for class evolution. This evolution technology supports an arbitrary set of changes to the classes, which may have arbitrarily large populations of persistent objects. We verify that the changes are safe. When there are format changes, we also convert all of the instances, while leaving their identities unchanged. We aspire to both very large persistent object stores and freedom for developers to specify arbitrary conversion methods in Java to convey information from old to new formats. Evolution operations must be safe and the evolution cost should be approximately linear in the number of objects that must be reformatted. In order that these conversion methods can be written easily, we continue to present the pre-evolution state consistently to Java executions throughout an evolution. At the completion of applying all of these transformations, we must switch the store state to present only the post-evolution state, with object identity preserved. We present an algorithm that meets these requirements for eager, total conversion. This paper focuses on the mechanisms built into Sphere to support safe, atomic and scalable evolution. We report our experiences in using this technology and include a preliminary set of performance measurements. JF - Persistent Object Systems: Design, Implementation, and Use 9th International Workshop, POS-9 Lillehammer, Norway, September 6–8, 2000 Revised Papers T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science PB - Springer VL - 2135 UR - http://www.springerlink.com/content/09hx07h9lw0p1h82/?p=2bc20319905146bab8ba93b2fcc8cc01&pi=23 ER - TY - CONF T1 - Scalable and Recoverable Implementation of Object Evolution for the PJama1 Platform T2 - POS Y1 - 2000 A1 - Atkinson, Malcolm P. A1 - Dmitriev, Misha A1 - Hamilton, Craig A1 - Printezis, Tony JF - POS ER - TY - CONF T1 - Stepwise Adaptation of Weights for Symbolic Regression with Genetic Programming T2 - Proceedings of the Twelfth Belgium/Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC'00) Y1 - 2000 A1 - Eggermont, J. A1 - van Hemert, J. I. ED - van den Bosch, A. ED - H. Weigand KW - data mining KW - genetic programming AB - In this paper we continue study on the Stepwise Adaptation of Weights (SAW) technique. Previous studies on constraint satisfaction and data clas-sification have indicated that SAW is a promising technique to boost the performance of evolutionary algorithms. Here we use SAW to boost per-formance of a genetic programming algorithm on simple symbolic regression problems. We measure the performance of a standard GP and two variants of SAW extensions on two different symbolic regression problems. JF - Proceedings of the Twelfth Belgium/Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC'00) PB - BNVKI, Dutch and the Belgian AI Association ER - TY - CHAP T1 - SAW-ing EAs: adapting the fitness function for solving constrained problems T2 - New ideas in optimization Y1 - 1999 A1 - Eiben, A. E. A1 - van Hemert, J. I. ED - D. Corne ED - M. Dorigo ED - F. Glover KW - constraint satisfaction AB - In this chapter we describe a problem independent method for treating constrain ts in an evolutionary algorithm. Technically, this method amounts to changing the defini tion of the fitness function during a run of an EA, based on feedback from the search pr ocess. Obviously, redefining the fitness function means redefining the problem to be sol ved. On the short term this deceives the algorithm making the fitness values deteriorate , but as experiments clearly indicate, on the long run it is beneficial. We illustrate t he power of the method on different constraint satisfaction problems and point out other application areas of this technique. JF - New ideas in optimization PB - McGraw-Hill, London ER - TY - CONF T1 - Solving Binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems using Evolutionary Algorithms with an Adaptive Fitness Function T2 - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science Y1 - 1998 A1 - Eiben, A. E. A1 - van Hemert, J. I. A1 - Marchiori, E. A1 - Steenbeek, A. G. ED - Eiben, A. E. ED - Th. B{\"a}ck ED - M. Schoenauer ED - H.-P. Schwefel KW - constraint satisfaction AB - This paper presents a comparative study of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). We focus on EAs where fitness is based on penalization of constraint violations and the penalties are adapted during the execution. Three different EAs based on this approach are implemented. For highly connected constraint networks, the results provide further empirical support to the theoretical prediction of the phase transition in binary CSPs. JF - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science PB - Springer-Verlag, Berlin ER -