The term hyper-heuristics describes a broad range of techniques that attempt to provide solutions to an array of problems from different domains. This paper describes the implementation of a hyperheuristic developed for entry into the Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge organised by the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning research group at the University of Nottingham. An algori...

Focusing on what an optimization problem may comply with, the so-called convergence conditions have been proposed and sequentially a stochastic optimization algorithm named as DSZ algorithm is presented in order to deal with both unconstrained and constrained optimizations. Its principle is discussed in the theoretical model of DSZ algorithm, from which we present a practical model of DSZ algor...

Many heuristic methods for NP hard optimization problems were developed in the past. Recently several new approaches based on analogies to processes of nature have been proposed. Considering the variety of methods available, a crucial question is which one to choose in practice. The behavior of any method depends strongly on parameters. Furthermore, time constraints often play an important role...

This paper considers a no-wait multi product flowshop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times. Lot streaming divide the lots of products into portions called sublots in order to reduce the lead times and work-in-process, and increase the machine utilization rates. The objective is to minimize the makespan. To clarify the system, mathematical model of the problem is presented. Sin...

Annual Crop Planning (ACP) is an NP-hard-type optimization problem in agricultural planning. It involves finding optimal solutions concerning the seasonal allocations of a limited amount of agricultural land amongst the various competing crops that are required to be grown on it. This study investigates the effectiveness of employing three new local search (LS) metaheuristic techniques in deter...

Abstract Application of memetic algorithm (MA) is considered in this work to solve the truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP). In TTRP, some customers can be designated as vehicle customers and can be serviced either by a complete vehicle (a trailer pulling by truck) or a single truck. However, some customers are known as truck customers and have to be serviced by a single truck. To employ t...

The main goal of the Frequency Assignment Problem in mobile radio networks consists of assigning a limited number of frequencies to each radio cell in a cellular network while minimizing electromagnetic interference due to the re-use of frequencies. This problem, known to be NP-hard, is of great importance in practice since better solutions will allow a telecommunications operator to manage lar...

Response surface methodology is a common tool in optimizing processes. It mainly concerns situations when there is only one response of interest. However, many designed experiments often involve simultaneous optimization of several quality characteristics. This is called a Multiresponse Surface Optimization problem. A common approach in dealing with these problems is to apply desirability funct...

This paper compares three heuristic search algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA) and tabu search (TS), for hardware-software partitioning. The algorithms operate on functional blocks for designs represented as directed acyclic graphs, with the objective of minimising processing time under various hardware area constraints. The comparison involves a model for calculating p...

We investigate cooperative local search to improve upon known results of the office-spaceallocation problem in universities and other organizations. A number of entities (e.g., research students, staff, etc.) must be allocated into a set of rooms so that the physical space is utilized as efficiently as possible while satisfying a number of hard and soft constraints. We develop an asynchronous c...