Recall that in the uncapacitated facility location problem we are given a set F of facilities and a set C of clients. There is a specified cost of opening a facility and specified distance between every pair i, j ∈ F ∪C. We assume that the distances satisfy the triangle inequality. The goal is to identify a set of facilities in F to serve all the clients in C such that the total facility and co...

MOTIVATION We study a stochastic method for approximating the set of local minima in partial RNA folding landscapes associated with a bounded-distance neighbourhood of folding conformations. The conformations are limited to RNA secondary structures without pseudoknots. The method aims at exploring partial energy landscapes pL induced by folding simulations and their underlying neighbourhood rel...

The Newton iteration is a popular method for minimising a cost function on Euclidean space. Various generalisations to cost functions defined on manifolds appear in the literature. In each case, the convergence rate of the generalised Newton iteration needed establishing from first principles. The present paper presents a framework for generalising iterative methods from Euclidean space to mani...

Many state-of-the-art heuristic planners derive their heuristic function by relaxing the planning task at hand, where the relaxation is to assume that all delete lists are empty. The success of such planners on many of the current benchmarks suggests that in those task’s state spaces relaxed goal distances yield a heuristic function of high quality. Recent work has revealed empirical evidence c...

In this paper the existence of two positive solutions for a Dirichlet problem having a critical growth, and depending on a real parameter, is established. The approach is based on methods which are totally variational, unlike the fundamental result of Ambrosetti, Brezis and Cerami where a clever combination of topological and variational methods is used in order to obtain the same conclusion. I...

The paper presents a feasibility computing approach to solve the optimal planning problem applied to Stand-alone Photovoltaic (SPV) system by considering the reliability requirement and economical performance. Evaluation technique based on genetic algorithm to get global optimum capacity of solar array and battery in a SPV system is more efficiently. Explicit strategy selects proper values of s...

One of the most critical features for applying local search to timetabling problems is the definition of the neighbourhood structure. In fact, for most common timetabling problems, there is more than one neighbourhood structure that is sufficiently natural and intuitive to deserve investigation. The reason for considering combination of diverse neighbourhood is related to the diversification of...

One of the main problems of optimization algorithms is that they often end up in a local optimum. It is, therefore, necessary to make sure that the algorithm gets out of the local optimum and eventually reaches the global optimum. One of the promising ways guiding one from the local optimum is prompted by the filled function method. It turns out that empirically, the best smoothing functions to...

Stochastic local search methods are widely used for solving positive instances of NP-hard problems. They are based on a partial exploration of a local search landscape characterized by a nite set, a tness function and a neighborhood relation. We think that theoretical or experimental study of these landscapes, independently of search algorithms , could provide a better understanding of local se...

This paper provides empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis, that a populational extension of simulated annealing with cooperative transitions leads to a significant increase of efficiency and solution quality for a given combinatorial optimization problem (and a neighborhood relation) if and only if the globally optimal solution is located "close" to the center of all locally optimal s...