New approaches for heuristic search: A bilateral linkage with artificial intelligence

This survey considers emerging approaches of heuristic search for solutions to combinatorially complex problems. Such problems arise in business applications, of traditional interest to operations research, such as in manufacturing operations, financial investment, capital budgeting and resource management. Artificial intelligence is a revived approach to problem-solving that requires heuristic search intrinsically in knowledge-base operations, especially for logical and analogical reasoning mechanisms. Thus, one bilateral linkage between operations research and artificial intelligence is their common interest in solving hard problems with heuristic search. That is the focus here. But longstanding methods of directed tree search with classical problem heuristics, such as for the Traveling Salesman Problem-a paradigm for combinatorially difficult problems-are not wholly satisfactory. Thus, new ap$roaches are needed, and it is at least stimulating that some of these are inspired by natural phenomena.