Local Search and Memetic Algorithms for Knapsack Problems

The 0-1 knapsack problem (KP) is widely studied in the last few decades. Despite of their simple structures, KP along with its extended versions belong to the class of NP-hard problems, and several optimization techniques have been developed to solve the problems. Some major examples are branch and bound methods and dynamic programming approaches [6], problemspecific heuristics [6], tabu search [2], and genetic algorithms [3][7][9]. Among the various approaches, genetic algorithms (GAs) have been studied extensively for the KP. Interesting topics found in the literature range from good solution representations [3], effective genetic operators [3], to the way of handling the single constraint of the problem [7][9].