This a summary of the author’s PhD thesis supervised by Leo Liberti, Philippe Baptiste and Daniel Krob and defended on 18 June 2009 at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. The thesis is written in English and is available at http://pastel.paristech.org/5275/. The computation of point-to-point shortest paths in road networks has many practical applications that require very fast solution time...

Repair-based search algorithms start with an initial solution and attempt to improve it by iteratively applying repair operators. Such algorithms can often handle large-scale problems that may be difficult for systematic search algorithms. Nevertheless, the computational cost of solving such problems is still very high. We observed that many of the repair steps applied by such algorithms are re...

We propose the integration and extension of the local branching search strategy in Constraint Programming (CP). Local branching is a general purpose heuristic method which searches locally around the best known solution by employing tree search. It has been successfully used in MIP where local branching constraints are used to model the neighborhood of an incumbent solution and improve the boun...

Mixed-Integer linear Programming (MIP) plays a central role in modeling difficult-to-solve (NP-hard) combinatorial problems. However, the exact solution of the resulting models often cannot be carried out for the problem sizes of interest in real-world applications, hence one is interested in effective heuristic methods. Although several heuristic and metaheuristic frameworks have been proposed...

We present an O∗(1.3160n)-time algorithm for the edge dominating set problem in an n-vertex graph, which improves previous exact algorithms for this problem. The algorithm is analyzed by using the “Measure and Conquer method.” We design new branching rules based on conceptually simple local structures, called “clique-producing vertices/cycles,” which significantly simplify the algorithm and its...

Finding high-quality solutions to mixed-integer linear programming problems (MILPs) is of great importance for many practical applications. In this respect, the refinement heuristic local branching (LB) has been proposed produce improving and highly influential development search methods in MILP. The algorithm iteratively explores a sequence solution neighborhoods defined by so-called constrain...