There is a growing consensus among urban analysts that inner-city neighborhoods suffer from a lack of social capital. Because these areas do not have a strong social infrastructure in place to support successful revitalization efforts, urban policy recommendations now call for developing social capital in the worst-off parts of our cities. However, this consensus has been reached without any em...

We are presenting in this volume selected, peer-reviewed, short papers that were presented at the 3rd International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS’14) which took place in Djerba, Tunisia, during October 8-11, 2014.

Available online 31 July 2008

Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) is a recent metaheuristic, or framework for building heuristics, which exploits systematically the idea of neighborhood change, both in the descent to local minima and in the escape from the valleys which contain them. In this tutorial we first present the ingredients of VNS, i.e., Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) and Reduced VNS (RVNS) followed by the basi...

Neighborhood discovery detection of the devices within communication range using HELLO messages is a fundamental mechanism in wireless sensor networks (WSN) which enables usage of many different topology control and routing algorithms. Even though it is very important, most of the algorithms does not take into account parameters of the neighborhood discovery. We present two algorithms that adap...

This article contributes to the knowledge base of neighborhood intervention and research by reviewing the myriad ways the construct neighborhood is operationalized. The interdisciplinary review presents a critical examination of each measurement genre from quantitative to qualitative. The discussion of neighborhood measures includes (a) census and other administrative data, (b) windshield surve...

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence parents’ educational expectations and aspirations, children’s cognitive skills, and children’s health. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, we argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects...

The course timetabling problem is one of the most difficult combinatorial problems, it requires the assignment of a fixed number of subjects into a number of time slots minimizing the number of student conflicts. This article presents a comparison between state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics and a newly proposed iterated variable neighborhood descent algorithm when solving the course timetabling p...

Measuring the Impact of CDBG Spending on Urban Neighborhoods We empirically investigate Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program spending in census tracts in 17 large cities. Regression analysis reveals several strong statistical associations between CDBG spending during 1994-96 and changes between 1993-94 and 1998-99 in three indicators that capture a wide range of neighborhood conditi...

execution of every planned program in cities has different process. process involves inhabitant's preferences, capacity of area or neighborhood, scale of people participation. after these strategies plans will prepared and executors apply them. planning in city scale considering potentials of area and participation of people is very important stage to eliminate undesirable appearances of c...