This volume constitutes the post- conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search, ICVNS 2019, held in Rabat, Morocco, in October 2019. The 13 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The papers describe recent advances in methods and applications of variable neighborhood search.
Meta-Heuristics: Advances and Trends in Local Search Paradigms for Optimizations comprises a carefully refereed selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Second Meta-Heuristics Conference (MIC 97). The selected articles describe the most recent developments in theory and applications of meta-heuristics, heuristics for specific problems, and comparative case studies. The book is divided into six parts, grouped mainly by the techniques considered. The extensive first part with twelve papers covers tabu search and its application to a great variety of well-known combinatorial optimization problems (including the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and vehicle routing problems). In the second part we find one paper where tabu search and simulated annealing are investigated comparatively and two papers which consider hybrid methods combining tabu search with genetic algorithms. The third part has four papers on genetic and evolutionary algorithms. Part four arrives at a new paradigm within meta-heuristics. The fifth part studies the behavior of parallel local search algorithms mainly from a tabu search perspective. The final part examines a great variety of additional meta-heuristics topics, including neural networks and variable neighbourhood search as well as guided local search. Furthermore, the integration of meta-heuristics with the branch-and-bound paradigm is investigated.
The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.
This book provides both the research and practitioner communities with a comprehensive coverage of the metaheuristic methodologies that have proven to be successful in a wide variety of real-world problem settings. Moreover, it is these metaheuristic strategies that hold particular promise for success in the future. The various chapters serve as stand alone presentations giving both the necessary background underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation.
With advancing technology and the digitization of the modern era, businesses are required to adopt the latest innovations computer science and information technology have to offer. The field of home healthcare must utilize the finest available operations management systems in order to remain relevant in a globalized world while also providing the best treatment possible to its patients. Transportation, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management in Home Healthcare: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that provides theoretical and empirical research on logistics management and transportation and scheduling routing and their applications in home healthcare and logistics. While highlighting topics such as hybrid energy, scheduling optimization, and forecasting techniques, this book is ideally designed for outpatient doctors and nurses, transportation professionals, logisticians, home healthcare managers, computer scientists, logistic engineers, health practitioners, academicians, researchers, and students.
Solving complex optimization problems with parallel metaheuristics Parallel Metaheuristics brings together an international group of experts in parallelism and metaheuristics to provide a much-needed synthesis of these two fields. Readers discover how metaheuristic techniques can provide useful and practical solutions for a wide range of problems and application domains, with an emphasis on the fields of telecommunications and bioinformatics. This volume fills a long-existing gap, allowing researchers and practitioners to develop efficient metaheuristic algorithms to find solutions. The book is divided into three parts: * Part One: Introduction to Metaheuristics and Parallelism, including an Introduction to Metaheuristic Techniques, Measuring the Performance of Parallel Metaheuristics, New Technologies in Parallelism, and a head-to-head discussion on Metaheuristics and Parallelism * Part Two: Parallel Metaheuristic Models, including Parallel Genetic Algorithms, Parallel Genetic Programming, Parallel Evolution Strategies, Parallel Ant Colony Algorithms, Parallel Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, Parallel Scatter Search, Parallel Variable Neighborhood Search, Parallel Simulated Annealing, Parallel Tabu Search, Parallel GRASP, Parallel Hybrid Metaheuristics, Parallel Multi-Objective Optimization, and Parallel Heterogeneous Metaheuristics * Part Three: Theory and Applications, including Theory of Parallel Genetic Algorithms, Parallel Metaheuristics Applications, Parallel Metaheuristics in Telecommunications, and a final chapter on Bioinformatics and Parallel Metaheuristics Each self-contained chapter begins with clear overviews and introductions that bring the reader up to speed, describes basic techniques, and ends with a reference list for further study. Packed with numerous tables and figures to illustrate the complex theory and processes, this comprehensive volume also includes numerous practical real-world optimization problems and their solutions. This is essential reading for students and researchers in computer science, mathematics, and engineering who deal with parallelism, metaheuristics, and optimization in general.
Finding exact solutions to many combinatorial optimization problems in busi ness, engineering, and science still poses a real challenge, despite the impact of recent advances in mathematical programming and computer technology. New fields of applications, such as computational biology, electronic commerce, and supply chain management, bring new challenges and needs for algorithms and optimization techniques. Metaheuristics are master procedures that guide and modify the operations of subordinate heuristics, to produce improved approx imate solutions to hard optimization problems with respect to more simple algorithms. They also provide fast and robust tools, producing high-quality solutions in reasonable computation times. The field of metaheuristics has been fast evolving in recent years. Tech niques such as simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, scatter search, greedy randomized adaptive search, variable neighborhood search, ant systems, and their hybrids are currently among the most efficient and robust optimization strategies to find high-quality solutions to many real-life optimiza tion problems. A very large nmnber of successful applications of metaheuristics are reported in the literature and spread throughout many books, journals, and conference proceedings. A series of international conferences entirely devoted to the theory, applications, and computational developments in metaheuristics has been attracting an increasing number of participants, from universities and the industry.
Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most prominent and successful techniques for solving computationally difficult problems. Offering a systematic treatment of SLS algorithms, this book examines the general concepts and specific instances of SLS algorithms and considers their development, analysis and application.
The first edition of Search Methodologies: Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques was originally put together to offer a basic introduction to the various search and optimization techniques that students might need to use during their research, and this new edition continues this tradition. Search Methodologies has been expanded and brought completely up to date, including new chapters covering scatter search, GRASP, and very large neighborhood search. The chapter authors are drawn from across Computer Science and Operations Research and include some of the world’s leading authorities in their field. The book provides useful guidelines for implementing the methods and frameworks described and offers valuable tutorials to students and researchers in the field. “As I embarked on the pleasant journey of reading through the chapters of this book, I became convinced that this is one of the best sources of introductory material on the search methodologies topic to be found. The book’s subtitle, “Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques”, aptly describes its aim, and the editors and contributors to this volume have achieved this aim with remarkable success. The chapters in this book are exemplary in giving useful guidelines for implementing the methods and frameworks described.” Fred Glover, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, USA “[The book] aims to present a series of well written tutorials by the leading experts in their fields. Moreover, it does this by covering practically the whole possible range of topics in the discipline. It enables students and practitioners to study and appreciate the beauty and the power of some of the computational search techniques that are able to effectively navigate through search spaces that are sometimes inconceivably large. I am convinced that this second edition will build on the success of the first edition and that it will prove to be just as popular.” Jacek Blazewicz, Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology and Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences
