Data clustering methods have been developed extensively in the data mining literature for detecting useful patterns in large datasets in the form of densely populated regions in a multi–dimensional Euclidean space. One of the challenges in dealing with these large databases is to obtain quality solutions within reasonable CPU time and memory requirements. Earlier partitioning methods such as PA...

This paper investigates the structure of qualitative capacities, which are monotonic increasing set functions ranging on a finite totally ordered scale equipped with an orderreversing map. More specifically, we study whether these qualitative set-functions can be viewed as classes of more particular set functions, namely possibility measures, paralleling the situation of quantitative capacities...

An uncapacitated facility location problem considers a set of n warehouses W and a set of m stores S. Each warehouse w has a fixed cost fw, and the transportation cost from warehouse w to store s is given by cws. The problem is to find a subset of warehouses and an assignment of warehouses to stores in order to minimize the fixed and transportation costs. Observe that once the warehouses are se...

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 Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) where local branching constraints are used to model the neighborhood of an incumbent solution and improve the bound. The neighborhoods are obtained by linear inequalities in the MIP model so that MI...

In this paper we propose three different VNS variants to solve the Max-Mean Dispersion Problem. This problem consists of selecting a set of elements in such a way that the average distance between them is maximized. To tackle this problem, we propose a Basic Variable Neighborhood Search (BVNS), a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) and a Generalized Variable Neighborhood Search (GVNS) that hybr...

In this issue we present a peer-reviewed selection of short papers that were accepted for presentation in the 4th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search (ICVNS’16) which was held in Málaga, Spain, during October 3-5, 2016. This conference is devoted to the Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic which was originally proposed by Nenad Mladenović and Pierre Hansen. This metho...

We are presenting in this volume selected, peer-reviewed, short papers that were presented at the EURO Mini Conference XXVIII on Variable Neighborhood Search (MEC XXVIII VNS) which was held during October 4-7, 2012, in Herceg Novi, Montenegro.