In this paper we study search heuristics for box decomposition methods that solve problems such as global optimization, minimax optimization, or quantified constraint solving. For this we unify these methods under a branch-and-bound framework, and develop a model that is more convenient for studying heuristics for such algorithms than the traditional models from Artificial Intelligence. We use ...

OBJECTIVES Skilled website developers value usability testing to assure user needs are met. When the target audience differs substantially from the developers, it becomes essential to tailor both design and evaluation methods. In this study, researchers carried out a multifaceted usability evaluation of a website (Healthy Texas) designed for Hispanic audiences with lower computer literacy and l...

There are two major criticisms about simulated annealing as a general method for solving combinatorial optimization problems: its effectiveness when compared with other welldesigned heuristics and its excessive computation time. In this paper, we show that simulated annealing, with properly des~gned annealing schedule and move generation strategy, achieves significant speerlups for high quality...

We present a memory-based approach to learning commonsense causal relations from episodic text. The method relies on dynamic memory which consists of events, event schemata, episodes, causal heuristics, and causal hypotheses. The learning algorithms are based on applying causal heuristics to precedents of new information. The heuristics are derived from principles of causation, and, to a limite...

This paper describes a heuristic creation process based on the notion of critical parameters, and a comparison experiment that demonstrates the utility of heuristics created for a specific system class. We focus on two examples of using the newly created heuristics to illustrate the utility of the usability evaluation method, as well as to provide support for the creation process, and we report...

Statistical disclosure control (SDC) methods reconcile the need to release information to researchers with the need to protect privacy of individual records. Microaggregation is a SDC method that protects data subjects by guarantying k-anonymity: Records are partitioned into groups of size at least k and actual data values are replaced by the group means so that each record in the group is indi...

Hyperheuristics can be defined to be heuristics which choose between heuristics in order to solve a given optimisation problem. The main motivation behind the development of such approaches is the goal of developing automated scheduling methods which are not restricted to one problem. In this paper we report the investigation of a hyperheuristic approach and evaluate it on various instances of ...

The Traveling Salesman Problem with Pickup and Delivery (PDTSP) is considered. Seven perturbation heuristics are applied to instances ranging from 51 to 443 vertices. The main point of perturbation heuristics is to help a local search process to move away from a local optimum. The seven heuristics fall into three categories: Instance Perturbation (IP), Algorithmic Perturbation (AP), and Solutio...

In this paper we present a dynamic heuristics that allows for improving the performance of a parallel instantiator algorithm based on the DLV system. In this system, each rule is rewritten in several “splits” of the same size that are assigned to a number of parallel instatiator subprocesses. The new heuristics allows for dynamically determining an optimal amount of work that has to be assigned...

In this paper, we study OAM measurement and alarm correlation methods in ATM networks. OAM fault management and performance management mechanisms are reviewed. We present the path intersection heuristics as the alarm correlation method to analyze the alarms collected by OAM measurements, and to find the congestion areas in ATM networks. We use simulation to evaluate the proposed heuristics. Bes...