The field of metaheuristics for the application to combinatorial optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of combinatorial optimization problems for the scientific as well as the industrial world. We give a survey of the nowadays most important metaheuristics from a conceptual point of view. We outline the different components and concepts that are used in the different metaheuristics in order to analyze their similarities and differences. Two very important concepts in metaheuristics are intensification and diversification. These are the two forces that largely determine the behaviour of a metaheuristic. They are in some way contrary but also complementary to each other. We introduce a framework, that we call the I&D frame, in order to put different intensification and diversification components into relation with each other. Outlining the advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches we conclude by pointing out the importance of hybridization of metaheuristics as well as the integration of metaheuristics and other methods for optimization.

This report describes an implementation of the Lin-Kernighan heuristic, one of the most successful methods for generating optimal or nearoptimal solutions for the symmetric traveling salesman problem. Computational tests show that the implementation is highly effective. It has found optimal solutions for all solved problem instances we have been able to obtain, including a 7397-city problem (the largest nontrivial problem instance solved to optimality today). Furthermore, the algorithm has improved the best known solutions for a series of large-scale problems with unknown optima, among these an 85900-city problem. 1.

Iterated Local Search has many of the desirable features of a metaheuristic: it is simple, easy to implement, robust, and highly effective. The essential idea of Iterated Local Search lies in focusing the search not on the full space of solutions but on a smaller subspace defined by the solutions that are locally optimal for a given optimization engine. The success of Iterated Local Search lies in the biased sampling of this set of local optima. How effective this approach turns out to be depends mainly on the choice of the local search, the perturbations, and the acceptance criterion. So far, in spite of its conceptual simplicity, it has lead to a number of state-of-the-art results without the use of too much problem-specific knowledge. But with further work so that the different modules are well adapted to the problem at hand, Iterated Local Search can often become a competitive or even state of the art algorithm. The purpose of this review is both to give a detailed description of this metaheuristic and to show where it stands in terms of performance. O.M. acknowledges support from the Institut Universitaire de France. This work was partially supported by the “Metaheuristics Network”, a Research Training Network funded by the Improving Human Potential programme of the CEC, grant HPRN-CT-1999-00106. The information provided is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not reflect the Community’s opinion. The Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing in this publication. 1 1

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) have emerged as an important model in economics and show promise as a useful tool for tackling resource allocation in AI. Unfortunately, winner determination for CAs is NP-hard and recent algorithms have difficulty with problems involving goods and bids beyond the hundreds. We apply a new stochastic local search algorithm, Casanova, to this problem, and demonstrate that it finds high quality (even optimal) solutions much faster than recently proposed methods (up to several orders of magnitude), particularly for large problems. We also propose a logical language for naturally expressing combinatorial bids in which a single logical bid corresponds to a large (often exponential) number of explicit bids. We show that Casanovaperforms much better than systematic methods on such problems. 1

We introduce a meta-heuristic to combine simulated annealing with local search methods for CO problems. This new class of Markov chains leads to significantly more powerful optimization methods than either simulated annealing or local search. The main idea is to embed deterministic local search techniques into simulated annealing so that the chain explores only local optima. It makes large, global changes, even at low temperatures, thus overcoming large barriers in configuration space. We have tested this meta-heuristic for the traveling salesman and graph partitioning problems. Tests on instances from public libraries and random ensembles quantify the power of the method. Our algorithm is able to solve large instances to optimality, improving upon state of the art local search methods very significantly. For the traveling salesman problem with randomly distributed cities in a square, the procedure improves on 3-opt by 1.6%, and on Lin-Kernighan local search by 1.3%. For the partitioni...

The combination of local search heuristics and genetic algorithms has been shown to be an effective approach for finding near-optimum solutions to the traveling salesman problem. In this paper, previously proposed genetic local search algorithms for the symmetric and asymmetric traveling salesman problem are revisited and potential improvements are identified. Since local search is the central component in which most of the computation time is spent, improving the efficiency of the local search operators is crucial for improving the overall performance of the algorithms. The modifications of the algorithms are described and the new results obtained are presented. The results indicate that the improved algorithms are able to arrive at better solutions in significantly less time. I. Introduction Consider a salesman who wants to start from his home city, visit each of a set of n cities exactly once, and then return home. Since the salesman is interested in finding the shortest possible r...

The combination of local search heuristics and genetic algorithms is a promising approach for finding nearoptimum solutions to the traveling salesman problem (TSP). In this paper, an approach is presented in which local search techniques are used to find local optima in a given TSP search space, and genetic algorithms are used to search the space of local optima in order to find the global optimum. New genetic operators for realizing the proposed approach are described, and the quality and efficiency of the solutions obtained for a set of symmetric and asymmetric TSP instances are discussed. The results indicate that it is possible to arrive at high quality solutions in reasonable time. I. Introduction In the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) [18], [27], a number of cities with distances between them is given and the task is to find the minimum--length closed tour that visits each city once and returns to its starting point. A symmetric TSP (STSP) is one where the distance between any...

Ant System, the first Ant Colony Optimization algorithm, showed to be a viable method for attacking hard combinatorial optimization problems. Yet, its performance, when compared to more fine-tuned algorithms, was rather poor for large instances of traditional benchmark problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem. To show that Ant Colony Optimization algorithms could be good alternatives to existing algorithms for hard combinatorial optimization problems, recent research in this ares has mainly focused on the development of algorithmic variants which achieve better performance than AS. In this article, we present ¨�©� � –¨��� � Ant System, an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm derived from Ant System. ¨�©� � –¨��� � Ant System differs from Ant System in several important aspects, whose usefulness we demonstrate by means of an experimental study. Additionally, we relate one of the characteristics specific to ¨� ¨ AS — that of using a greedier search than Ant System — to results from the search space analysis of the combinatorial optimization problems attacked in this paper. Our computational results on the Traveling Salesman Problem and the Quadratic Assignment Problem show that ¨�©� � – ¨��� � Ant System is currently among the best performing algorithms for these problems.

:- Due to the stubborn nature of the deterministic job-shop scheduling problem many solutions proposed are of hybrid construction cutting across the traditional disciplines. The problem has been investigated from a variety of perspectives resulting in several analytical techniques combining generic as well as problem specific strategies. We seek to assess a subclass of this problem in which the objective is minimising makespan, by providing an overview of the history, the techniques used and the researchers involved. The sense and direction of their work is evaluated by assessing the reported results of their techniques on the available benchmark problems. From these results the current situation and pointers for future work are provided. KEYWORDS:- Scheduling Theory; Job-Shop; Review; Computational Study; 1. INTRODUCTION Current market trends such as consumer demand for variety, shorter product life cycles and competitive pressure to reduce costs have resulted in the need for zero i...

We consider a new class of optimization heuristics which combine local searches with stochastic sampling methods, allowing one to iterate local optimization heuristics. We have tested this on the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem, improving 3-opt by over 1.6% and Lin-Kernighan by 1.3%. This work was supported in part by the grants DOE-FG03-85ER25009 and NSF-ECS8909127, and by a grant from the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. Correspondence regarding this work should be addressed to S. Otto. y This manuscript was published in Operation Research Letters, v. 11, pp. 219--24, 1992. 1 Introduction Given N cities labeled by i = 1; N , separated by distances d ij , the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) consists in finding the shortest tour, i.e., the shortest closed path visiting every city exactly once. To be specific, we will consider the symmetric TSP where d ij = d ji , but our method generalizes to the asymmetric case also. The problem of finding the optimal tour is a difficult...