The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is the problem of finding the shortest tour through all the nodes that a salesman has to visit. The TSP is probably the most famous and extensively studied problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. Because this problem is an NP-hard problem, practical large-scale instances cannot be solved by exact algorithms within acceptable computational times. ...

Hyper-parameter optimization is an important problem in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Recently, a group of studies has focused on using sequential Bayesian Optimization to solve this problem, which aims to reduce the number of iterations and trials required during the optimization process. In this paper, we explore this problem from a different angle, and propose a mul...

Grasp planning for multi-fingered hands is computationally expensive due to the joint-contact coupling, surface nonlinearities and high dimensionality, thus is generally not affordable for real-time implementations. Traditional planning methods by optimization, sampling or learning work well in planning for parallel grippers but remain challenging for multifingered hands. This paper proposes a ...

Evolutionary optimization methods~namely, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and evolution strategies~represent a category of non−traditional optimization algorithms drawing inspirations from the process of natural evolution. Particle swarm optimization represents another set of more recently developed algorithmic optimizers inspired by social behaviours of organisms such as birds [8] and...

Multi-stage financial decision optimization under uncertainty depends on a careful numerical approximation of the underlying stochastic process, which describes the future returns of the selected assets or asset categories. Various approaches towards an optimal generation of discrete-time, discrete-state approximations (represented as scenario trees) have been suggested in the literature. In th...

We introduce a two-staged Genetic Algorithm for optimizing weighted random pattern testing in a Built-InSelf-Test (BIST) environment. The first stage includes the OBDD-based optimization of input probabilities with regard to the expected test length. The optimization itself is constrained to discrete weight values which can directly be integrated in a BIST environment. During the second stage, ...

This paper addresses the class of nonlinear mixed integer stochastic programming problems. In particular, we consider two-stage problems with nonlinearities both in the objective function and constraints, pure integer first stage and mixed integer second stage variables. We exploit the specific problem structure to develop a global optimization algorithm. The basic idea is to decompose the orig...

In this paper, a new way of optimizing fuzzy logic is introduced. This way is used to optimize the output of Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic controller by replacing the Defuzzification stage by the Optimization algorithm. The algorithm chooses the best crisp output variable from the type-reduced set which is the output of the Type-Reduction stage instead of averaging the set extremes which was perf...

This paper describes STAGE, a learning approach to automatically improving search performance on optimization problems. STAGE learns an evaluation function which predicts the outcome of a local search algorithm, such as hillclimbing or WALKSAT, as a function of state features along its search trajectories. The learned evaluation function is used to bias future search trajectories toward better ...

In this paper we study specially structured two stage flow shop scheduling problem with jobs in a string of disjoint job blocks having sequence independent setup times separated from processing times each associated with their respective probabilities including job weightage. In flow shop scheduling optimization of elapsed time may not always result in optimization of utilization time. Here, th...