Stochastic solvers are researched primarily with the goal of providing ‘black box’ optimisation approaches for situations where the optimisation problem is too complex to model and therefore impossible to solve using a deterministic approach. Sometimes, however, problems or their instances have characteristics which interact with the solver in undocumented and unpredictable ways. This paper rev...

Stochastic solvers are researched primarily with the goal of providing ‘black box’ optimisation approaches for situations where the optimisation problem is too complex to model and therefore impossible to solve using a deterministic approach. Sometimes, however, problems or their instances have characteristics which interact with the solver in undocumented and unpredictable ways. This paper rev...

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In this paper, an algorithm based on ant colony optimization for community detection from bipartite networks is presented. The algorithm establishes a model graph for the ants’ searching. Each ant chooses its path according to the pheromone and heuristic information on each edge to construct a solution. Experimental results show that our algorithm can not only accurately identify the number of ...

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) has been successfully applied to the classification task of data mining in the form of Ant-Miner. A new extension of Ant-Miner, called cAnt-MinerPB, uses the ACO procedure in a different fashion. The main difference is that the search in cAnt-MinerPB is optimised to find the best list of rules, whereas in AntMiner the search is optimised to find the best individual...

Balancing bike sharing systems is an increasingly important problem, because of the rising popularity of this mean of transportation. Bike sharing systems need to be balanced so that bikes (and empty slots for returning bikes) are available to the customers, thus ensuring an adequate level of service. In this paper, we tackle the problem of balancing a real-world bike sharing system (BBSS) by m...

In this paper we propose an application of the Ant System (AS) to optimize combinational logic circuits at the gate level. We deene a measure of quality improvement in partially built circuits to compute the distances required by the AS and we consider as optimal those solutions that represent functional circuits with a minimum amount of gates. The proposed methodology is described together wit...

Constructive metaheuristics explore a tree of constructive decisions, the topology of which is determined by the way solutions are represented and constructed. Some solution representations allow particular solutions to be reached on a greater number of paths in this construction tree than other solutions, which can introduce a bias to the search. A bias can also be introduced by the topology o...