in recent years, size of vlsi circuits is dramatically grown and layout generation of current circuits has become a dominant task in design flow. standard cell placement is an effective stage of physical design and quality of placement affects directly on the performance, power consumption and signal immunity of design. placement can be performed analytically or heuristically. analytical placer...

Hyper-heuristics are proposed as a higher level of abstraction as compared to the metaheuristics. Hyper-heuristic methods deploy a set of simple heuristics and use only nonproblem-specific data, such as, fitness change or heuristic execution time. A typical iteration of a hyper-heuristic algorithm consists of two phases: heuristic selection method and move acceptance. In this paper, heuristic s...

This paper argues that many exact and heuristic methods have common structure that permits some degree of unification. It interprets solution algorithms as primal-dual methods in which the primal component searches over problem restrictions, and the dual component obtains bounds on the optimal value. In particular, the concept of an inference dual provides the basis for constraint-directed sear...