Training neural networks is a complex task that is important for supervised learning. A few metaheuristic optimization techniques have been applied to increase the effectiveness of the training process. The Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm is a recently developed meta-heuristic optimization algorithm which is suitable for solving optimization problems. In this paper, Cuckoo search is implemented in...

Workgroup assignment problems commonly appear in various settings including international business schools. Especially if diverse people, like students, need to be divided into workgroups one may seek environments where diversity is fostered by generating heterogeneous workgroups. We study a problem of workgroups diversity maximization, i.e., the problem of building workgroups with the goal of ...

In this work we use metaheuristic search to improve Google’s Guava library, finding a semantically equivalent version of com.google. common.collect.ImmutableMultimap with reduced energy consumption. Semantics-preserving transformations are found in the source code, using the principle of subtype polymorphism. We introduce a new tool, Opacitor, to deterministically measure the energy consumption...

The application of metaheuristic search techniques in test data generation has been extensively investigated in recent years. Most studies, however, have concentrated on the application of such techniques in structural testing. The use of search-based techniques in functional testing is less frequent, the main cause being the implicit nature of the specification. On the other hand, such techniq...

This paper investigates the permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) with the objectives of minimizing the makespan and the total flowtime and proposes a hybrid metaheuristic based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO). To enhance the exploration ability of the hybrid metaheuristic, a simulated annealing hybrid with a stochastic variable neighborhood search is incorporated. To improve ...

Heuristic and metaheuristic techniques are used for solving computationally hard optimization problems. Local search is a heuristic technique while Ant colony optimization (ACO), inspired by the ants’ foraging behavior, is one of the most recent metaheuristic technique. These techniques are used for solving optimization problems. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) detection problem is an NP-...

Assortment planning is the process in which a retailer selects a product line to offer to customers and is a key determinant of a retailer’s profit. We consider the assortment planning problem using a locational choice model for customer product selection and allow for both horizontal and vertical product differentiation. When the distribution of customer preference is unimodal, the optimal sol...

Metaheuristics represent an important class of techniques to solve, approximately, hard combinatorial optimization problems for which the use of exact methods is impractical. In this work, we propose a hybrid version of the GRASP metaheuristic, which incorporates a data mining process, to solve the p-median problem. We believe that patterns obtained by a data mining technique, from a set of sub...

The aim of this paper is to develop a hybrid metaheuristic based on Variable Neighbourhood Search and Tabu Search for solving the Feature Subset Selection Problem in classification. Given a set of instances characterized by several features, the classification problem consists of assigning a class to each instance. Feature Subset Selection Problem selects a relevant subset of features from the ...

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...