In method-based software development, software engineers create artifacts based on the heuristic rules of the adopted method. Most CASE tools, however, do not actively assist software engineers in applying the heuristic rules. To provide an active support, the rules must be formalized, implemented and integrated within the framework of current CASE tools. In this paper we describe an approach f...

Scheduling in large scale distributed computing environments such as Computational Grids, is currently receiving a considerable attention of researchers. Despite that scheduling in such systems has much in common with scheduling in traditional distributing systems, the new characteristics of Grid systems make the problem more complex and versatile to match different needs of Grid-enabled applic...

The k-modes algorithm has become a popular technique in solving categorical data clustering problems in different application domains. However, the algorithm requires random selection of initial points for the clusters. Different initial points often lead to considerable distinct clustering results. In this paper we present an experimental study on applying a farthest-point heuristic based init...

We compare in this paper the best heuristic methods known up to now to solve the flow shop sequencing problem and we improve the complexity of the best one. Next, we apply to this problem taboo search, a new technique to solve combinatorial optimization problems, and we report computational experiments. Finally a parallel taboo search algorithm is presented and experimental results show that th...

Load shedding has been extensively studied because of multiple power system failure occurrences worldwide. Reliable techniques are required to provide rapid and precise load shedding to avert voltage collapse in power networks. Meta-heuristic optimization approaches are currently the widely developed methods because of their robustness and flexibility in dealing with complex and non-linear syst...

Workflows are used nowadays in different areas of application. Emergency services are one of these areas where explicitly defined workflows help to increase traceability, control, efficiency, and quality of rescue missions. In this paper, we introduce a generic workflow model for describing fire fighting operations in different scenarios. Based on this model we also describe heuristics for calc...

In double-sided markets for computing resources an optimal allocation schedule among job offers and requests subject to relevant capacity constraints can be determined. With increasing storage demands and emerging storage services the question how to schedule storage jobs becomes more and more interesting. Since such scheduling problems are often in the class NP-complete an exact computation is...

In this paper we focus on the test selection problem. It is modeled after a real-life problem that arises in telecommunication when one has to check the reliability of an application. We apply different metaheuristics, namely Reactive Tabu Search (RTS), Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) to solve the problem. We propose some modifications to the conventional schemes including ...

The Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) problem is a fundamental problem arising in defense-related applications of operations research. This problem consists of optimally assigning n weapons to m targets so that the total expected survival value of the targets after all the engagements is minimum. The WTA problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem and is known to be NP-com...