A hybrid data mining GRASP with path-relinking

The exploration of hybrid metaheuristics — combination of metaheuristics with concepts and processes from other research areas — has been an important trend in combinatorial optimization research. In this work, we developed a hybrid version of the GRASP metaheuristic which incorporates the path-relinking procedure — a memory-based intensification strategy — and a data mining module. Computational experiments showed that employing the combination of path-relinking and data mining allowed GRASP to find better results in less computational time. Another contribution of this work is the application of the path-relinking hybrid proposal for the 2-path network design problem, which improved the state-of-the-art solutions for this problem.