Annual Crop Planning (ACP) is an NP-hard-type optimization problem in agricultural planning. It involves finding optimal solutions concerning the seasonal allocations of a limited amount of agricultural land amongst the various competing crops that are required to be grown on it. This study investigates the effectiveness of employing three new local search (LS) metaheuristic techniques in deter...

Metaheuristic algorithms are often nature-inspired, and they are becoming very powerful in solving global optimization problems. More than a dozen of major metaheuristic algorithms have been developed over the last three decades, and there exist even more variants and hybrid of metaheuristics. This paper intends to provide an overview of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, from a brief hi...

The necessity for clean and sustainable energy has shifted the sector’s interest in renewable sources. Photovoltaics (PV) is most popular source because sun ubiquitous. However, PV’s power transfer efficiency varies with different load’s electrical characteristics, temperatures on PV panels, insolation conditions. Based these factors, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) a mechanism formulated a...

The urban waste collection is one of the major municipal activities that involves large expenditures and difficult operational problems. Also, waste collection and disposal have high expenses such as investment cost (i.e. vehicles fleet) and high operational cost (i.e. fuel, maintenance). In fact, making slight improvements in this issue lead to a huge saving in municipal consumption. Some inci...

Harmony Search (HS) is a phenomenon-mimicking algorithm a metaheuristic inspired by the improvisation process of musicians proposed by Zong Woo Geem (2001). Multiobjective, Multiconstratined optimization for determining the Global Optima from several Local Optima is challenging and toughest task, which can be strategically solved by HS metaheuristic algorithm. The capability of the improvisatio...

In this paper, we propose three new metaheuristic implementations to address the problem of minimizing the makespan in a hybrid flexible flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times. The first metaheuristic is a genetic algorithm (GA) embedding two new crossover operators, and the second is an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm which incorporates a transition rule featuring lookahead infor...