This paper argues that many exact and heuristic methods have common structure that permits some degree of unification. It interprets solution algorithms as primal-dual methods in which the primal component searches over problem restrictions, and the dual component obtains bounds on the optimal value. In particular, the concept of an inference dual provides the basis for constraint-directed sear...

A Real-Time Optimization (RTO) strategy incorporating the fuzzy sets theory is developed, where the problem constraints obtained from process considerations are treated in fuzzy environment. Furthermore, the objective function is penalized by a fuzzified form of the key process constraints. To enable using conventional optimization techniques, the resulting fuzzy optimization problem is the...

Massive computations in today's computer applications necessitate the use of high-performance computing environments. Unfor-tunately, high costs and power management must be addressed while operating these Volunteer (VC) enables creation a global network devices capable accumulating their to outperform any supercomputer. VC refers underutilized resources donated by thousands volunteers who want...

The goal of classical domain-independent planning is to find a sequence of actions which lead from a given initial state to a goal state that satisfies some goal criteria. Most planning systems use heuristic search algorithms to find such a sequence of actions. A critical part of heuristic search is the heuristic function. In order to find a sequence of actions from an initial state to a goal s...

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a well-know and complex combinatorial problem, which has received considerable attention in recent years. This problem has been addressed using many different techniques including both exact and heuristic methods. The VRPTW benchmark problems of Solomon (1987) have been most commonly chosen to evaluate and to compare all solutions propose...

Delay management models determine which connections should be maintained in case of a delayed feeder train. Recently, delay management models are developed that take into account that passengers will adjust their routes when they miss a connection. However, for largescale real-world instances, these extended models become too large to be solved with standard integer programming techniques. We t...

The dynamic space allocation problem (DSAP) presented in this paper considers the task of assigning items (resources) to locations during a multi-period planning horizon such that the cost of rearranging the items is minimized. Three tabu search heuristics are presented for this problem. The first heuristic is a simple basic tabu search heuristic. The second heuristic adds diversification and i...

Stock market price index prediction is a challenging task for investors and scholars. Artificial neural networks have been widely employed to predict financial stock market levels thanks to their ability to model nonlinear functions. The accuracy of backpropagation neural networks trained with different heuristic and numerical algorithms is measured for comparison purpose. It is found that nume...

The existence of multiple decision-makers and goals, spatial and non-linear forest management objectives and the combinatorial nature of forest planning problems are reasons that support the use of heuristic optimisation algorithms in forest planning instead of the more traditional LP methods. A heuristic is a search algorithm that does not necessarily find the global optimum but it can produce...