More than 40 years ago Kent Flannery coined the term Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) in reference to a broadening of the subsistence base of Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherers in the Near East that preceded and helped pave the way for the domestication and plants and animals and the emergence of agriculture. Set within a demographic density model that projected differential rates of population g...

there is little consensus on the corporate diversification-efficiency relationship in the diversification literature. the study aims to contribute to the literature by looking jointly at two dimensions of corporate diversification as product diversification and international diversification and the relationship between them. the results show negative relationship between product diversification...

This paper addresses the linear ordering problem, which has been solved using different metaheuristics approaches. These algorithms have the common problem of finding a proper balance of the intensification and diversification processes; in this work we propose an iterated local search in which it is incorporated a Becker heuristic strategy for constructing the initial solution, and a search st...

Both in industry and science there are some real problems regarding the optimization of difficult solution characterized by computational complexity, because the available exact algorithms are inefficient or simply impossible to implement. The metaheuristics (MHs) are a family of approximate methods of general purpose consisting in iterative procedures that guide heuristics, intelligently combi...

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is becoming one of the most important swarm intelligent paradigms for solving global optimization problems. Although some progress has been made to improve PSO algorithms over the last two decades, additional work is still needed to balance parameters to achieve better numerical properties of accuracy, efficiency, and stability. In the optimal PSO algorithm, th...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms are a recently developed, population-based approach which has been successfully applied to optimization problems. However, in the ACO algorithms it is difficult to adjust the balance between intensification and diversification and thus the performance is not always very well. In this work, we propose an improved ACO algorithm in which some of ants can ev...

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...

The principles of the Greedy Randomized Adaptative Search Procedure (GRASP) metaheuristic are instantiated for the set packing problem. We investigated several construction phases, and evaluated improvements based on advanced strategies. These improvements include a self-tuning procedure (using reactive GRASP), an intensification procedure (using path relinking) and a procedure involving the di...