Stochastic local search techniques have been successful in solving propositional satisfiability (SAT) problems encoded in conjunctive normal form (CNF). Recently complete solvers have shown that there are advantages to tackling propositional satisfiability problems in a more expressive natural representation, since the conversion to CNF can lose problem structure and introduce significantly mor...

In this paper we present a cycle-cutset driven stochastic local search algorithm which approximates the optimum of sums of unary and binary potentials, called Stochastic Tree Local Search or STLS. We study empirically two pure variants of STLS against the state-of-the art GLS scheme and against a hybrid.

ILP has been successfully applied to a variety of tasks. Nevertheless, ILP systems have huge time and storage requirements, owing to a large search space of possible clauses. Therefore, clever search strategies are needed. One promising family of search strategies is that of stochastic local search methods. These methods have been successfully applied to propositional tasks, such as satisfiabil...

the problem we investigate deals with the optimal assignment of resources to the activities of a stochastic project network. we seek to minimize the expected cost of the project include sum of resource utilization costs and lateness costs. we assume that the work content required by the activities follows an exponential distribution. the decision variables of the model are the allocated resourc...

In combinatorial solution spaces Iterated Local Search turned out to be exceptionally successful. The question arises: is the Iterated Local Search heuristic also able to improve the optimization process in real-valued solution spaces? This paper introduces a hybrid meta-heuristic based on Iterated Local Search and Powell’s optimization method combined with elements from stochastic search in re...

We introduce a novel stochastic local search algorithm for the vertex cover problem. Compared to current exhaustive search techniques, our algorithm achieves excellent performance on a suite of problems drawn from the field of biology. We also evaluate our performance on the commonly used DIMACS benchmarks for the related clique problem, finding that our approach is competitive with the current...

In this paper, we propose a stochastic dynamic local search (SDLS) method for Multiple-Valued Logic (MVL) learning by introducing stochastic dynamics into the traditional local search method. The proposed learning network maintains some trends of quick descent to either global minimum or a local minimum, and at the same time has some chance of escaping from local minima by permitting temporary ...

Optimization of expected values in a stochastic domain is common in real world applications. However, it is often difficult to solve such optimization problems without significant knowledge about the surface defined by the stochastic function. I n this paper we examine local search techniques to solve stochastic Optimization. I n particular, we analyze assumptions of smoothness upon which these...

Stochastic search algorithms are often robust, scalable problem solvers. In this paper, we concern ourselves with the class of stochastic search algorithms called stochastic sampling. Randomization in such a search framework can be an effective means of expanding search around a stochastic neighborhood of a strong domain heuristic. Specifically, we show that a value-biased approach can be more ...

In this article, we describe the steps that have been followed in the development of a high performing stochastic local search algorithm for the probabilistic travelling salesman problem, a paradigmatic combinatorial stochastic optimization problem. In fact, we have followed a bottom-up algorithm engineering process that starts from basic algorithms (here, iterative improvement) and adds comple...