Network decontamination (or disinfection) is a widely studied problem in distributed computing. Network sites are assumed to be contaminated (e.g., by a virus) and a team of agents is deployed to decontaminate the whole network. In the vast literature a variety of assumptions are made on the power of the agents, which can typically communicate, exchange information, remember the past, etc. In t...

In this paper we propose three different VNS variants to solve the Max-Mean Dispersion Problem. This problem consists of selecting a set of elements in such a way that the average distance between them is maximized. To tackle this problem, we propose a Basic Variable Neighborhood Search (BVNS), a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) and a Generalized Variable Neighborhood Search (GVNS) that hybr...

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo’s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling in practice, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty regarding the good’s value. We find that Moore-Repullo mechanisms fail to implement truth-telling in a s...

Medical data sets consist of a huge amount of data organized in instances, where each one contains several attributes. The quality of the models obtained from a database strongly depends on the information previously stored on it. For this reason, these data sets must be preprocessed in order to have fairly information about patients. Data sets are preprocessed reducing the amount of data. For ...

In this issue we present a peer-reviewed selection of short papers that were accepted for presentation in the 4th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search (ICVNS’16) which was held in Málaga, Spain, during October 3-5, 2016. This conference is devoted to the Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic which was originally proposed by Nenad Mladenović and Pierre Hansen. This metho...

A remarkable result, due to Moore & Repullo (1988) is that any social choice function can be implemented as the unique equilibrium of a suitably constructed dynamic game (subgame perfect implementation). Yet such mechanisms are never observed in practice, which raises the question: why not? In this paper we test such mechanisms experimentally and find that even small deviations from perfect inf...