Two metaheuristic methods based on Tabu search are introduced to assign judges to individual competitions in a tournament. The complexity of the mathematical formulation accounting for the assignment rules, leads us to use such an approach. The first metaheuristic includes two different Tabu searches that are combined with a diversification strategy. The second metaheuristic is applied to a pen...

In studies of genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing, and ant colony mechanisms, it is recognized that the higher-order forms of collective intelligence play an important role in metaheuristic computing and computational intelligence. Collective intelligence is an integration of collective behaviors of individuals in social groups or collective functions of components in computational intel...

This paper describes the parallelization of a two-phase metaheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and a central depot (VRPTW). The underlying objective function combines the minimization of the number of vehicles in the first search phase of the metaheuristic with the minimization of the total travel distance in the second search phase. The parallelization of the metaheuri...

Search-based software testing is the application of metaheuristic search techniques to generate software tests. The test adequacy criterion is transformed into a fitness function and a set of solutions in the search space are evaluated with respect to the fitness function using a metaheuristic search technique. The application of metaheuristic search techniques for testing is promising due to f...

Search-based software testing is the application of metaheuristic search techniques to generate software tests. The test adequacy criterion is transformed into a fitness function and a set of solutions in the search space are evaluated with respect to the fitness function using a metaheuristic search technique. The application of metaheuristic search techniques for testing is promising due to t...

We present a novel application of the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm to solve the non-unicost Set Covering Problem. The Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is a recent Swarm Metaheuristic technique based on the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. We present a 2-level metaheuristic approach where an Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm acts as a low-level metaheuristic and its paremeters are se...

Metaheuristic algorithms are traditionally designed following a manual, iterative algorithm development process. While this process sometimes leads to high performing algorithms, it is labor-intensive, error-prone, difficult to reproduce, and explores only a limited number of design alternatives. In this article, we advocate the automatic design of hybrid metaheuristic algorithms. For an effect...

This paper is concerned with an aspect of the design of metaheuristic algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms, tabu search and ant colony optimization. The topic that is considered is how problems can be represented when they are given to a metaheuristic algorithm. A particular difficulty is presented, viz. the “bottleneck”, where the problem is artificially converted into a new representat...

Many problems that we face nowadays can be expressed as optimization problems. Finding the best solution for real-world instances of such problems is hard or even infeasible. Metaheuristic algorithms have been used for decades to guide the search for satisfactory solutions in hard optimization problems at an affordable cost. However, despite its many benefits, the application of metaheuristics ...

Over the last years, so-called hybrid optimization approaches have become increasingly popular for addressing hard optimization problems. In fact, when looking at leading applications of metaheuristics for complex real-world scenarios, many if not most of them do not purely adhere to one specific classical metaheuristic model but rather combine different algorithmic techniques. Concepts from di...