A great wealth of information is hidden amid medical research data that in some cases cannot be easily analyzed, if at all, using classical statistical methods. Inspired by nature, metaheuristic algorithms have been developed to offer optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex data analysis and decision-making tasks in a reasonable time. Due to their powerful features, metaheuristic algorithm...

This paper presents an approach for the automated cryptanalysis of substitution ciphers based on a recent evolutionary metaheuristic called Scatter Search. It is a population-based metaheuristic founded on a formulation proposed two decades ago by Fred Glover. It uses linear combinations on a population subsets to create new solutions while other evolutionary approaches like genetic algorithms ...

The article presents the hybrid metaheuristic-neural assessment of the pull-off adhesion in existing multi-layer cement composites using artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA). The ICA is a metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the human political-social evolution. This method is based solely on the use of ANNs and two non-destructive testing (NDT) metho...

Evolutionary computation is inspired by nature in order to formulate metaheuristics capable to optimize several kinds of problems. A family of algorithms has emerged based on this idea; e.g. genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies, particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), etc. In this paper we show a populationbased metaheuristic inspired on the gravitational forces...

The permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) is one of the most well known and well studied production scheduling problems with strong industrial background. Most scheduling problems are combinatorial optimization problems which are too difficult to be solved optimally, and hence heuristics are used to obtain good solutions in a reasonable time. The specific goal of this paper is to inve...

The importance of high performance algorithms for tackling difficult optimization problems cannot be understated, and in many cases the most effective methods are metaheuristics. When designing a metaheuristic, simplicity should be favored, both conceptually and in practice. Naturally, it must also lead to effective algorithms, and if possible, general purpose ones. If we think of a metaheurist...

Chromatic number, chromatic sum and chromatic sum number are important graph coloring characteristics. The paper proves that a parallel metaheuristic like the parallel genetic algorithm (PGA) can be efficiently used for computing approximate sum colorings and finding upper bounds for chromatic sums and chromatic sum numbers for hard– to–color graphs. Suboptimal sum coloring with PGA gives usual...

This paper discusses the problem of estimating, on the basis of a given number of say N experiments, the expected performance of a metaheuristic on a class I of benchmark problem instances. The problem of the empirical estimation of the expected behavior of a stochastic optimization algorithm has great relevance both in academic studies and in practical applications. This is particularly true f...

    Given the increasing number of documents, sites, online sources, and the users’ desire to quickly access information, automatic textual summarization has caught the attention of many researchers in this field. Researchers have presented different methods for text summarization as well as a useful summary of those texts including relevant document sentences. This study select...

Colliding Bodies Optimization (CBO) is a population-based metaheuristic algorithm that complies physics laws of momentum and energy. Due to the stagnation susceptibility of CBO by premature convergence and falling into local optima, some meritorious methodologies based on Sine Cosine Algorithm and a mutation operator were considered to mitigate the shortcomings mentioned earlier. Sine Cosine Al...