The Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic is based on systematic changes in the neighborhood structure within a search. It has been succesfully applied for solving various combinatorial and global optimization problems, and related tasks. The aim of this special cluster of papers in this issue of International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) is to gather not only recent a...

This paper describes a new approach to solving the vehicle route problem with Multiple Trips. The proposed algorithm (IVNDS) is based on the Iterative Local Search meta-heuristic which uses two consecutive Variable Neighbourhood Descendent (VND) procedures in the improvement phase. The VND procedures are differentiated by the search spaces they explore. The first VND performs moves in routes of...

A Variable Neighbourhood Search algorithm that employs new neighbourhoods is proposed for solving a task allocation problem whose main characteristics are: (i) each task requires a certain amount of resources and each processor has a capacity constraint which limits the total resource of the tasks that are assigned to it; (ii) the cost of solution includes fixed costs when using processors, tas...

The aim of this paper is to develop a hybrid metaheuristic based on Variable Neighbourhood Search and Tabu Search for solving the Feature Subset Selection Problem in classification. Given a set of instances characterized by several features, the classification problem consists of assigning a class to each instance. Feature Subset Selection Problem selects a relevant subset of features from the ...

This work considers the optimisation of component placement sequencing to improve the efficiency of theoretical multi-head surface mount device placement machines in printed circuit board assembly. We develop a Variable Neighbourhood Monte Carlo Search (VNMS), which employs a variable neighbourhood search technique with an Exponential Monte Carlo acceptance criterion. VNMS is a descent-ascent h...

This work presents a heuristic for component pick-and-place sequencing to improve the throughput of a multi-head surface mount device placement machine for assembling printed circuit board. We present a Variable Neighbourhood Monte Carlo Search (VNMS), which employs variable neighbourhood search with an Exponential Monte Carlo acceptance criterion. VNMS is a descent-ascent heuristic that operat...

Stochastic Local Searches (SLS) are a class of meta-heuristics for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. Common examples of such problems are satisfiability (SAT), travelling salesman problem (TSP), job shop problem (JSP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP). The set of all possible solutions to one of these problems is called the search space. Each point (solution) in the search space...