in recent years, size of vlsi circuits is dramatically grown and layout generation of current circuits has become a dominant task in design flow. standard cell placement is an effective stage of physical design and quality of placement affects directly on the performance, power consumption and signal immunity of design. placement can be performed analytically or heuristically. analytical placer...

Different kinds of meta-heuristic algorithms have been recently utilized to overcome the complex nature of optimum design of structures. In this paper, an integrated optimization procedure with the objective of minimizing the self-weight of real size structures is simply performed interfacing SAP2000 and MATLAB® softwares in the form of parallel computing. The meta-heuristic algorithm chosen he...

This paper presents a negotiation heuristic for software agents that enable agents to learn about the opponent’s behavior and use market information while conducting online negotiations. The heuristic is tested in a pilot experimental study, where the performance of agents is evaluated with respect to human negotiators in a simulated electronic market. Preliminary results indicate that agents m...

In previous lectures, we have discussed that people often use so-called heuristics, e.g. anchoring and the representativeness heuristic, instead of behaving completely rationally. The present lecture, which is based on a paper by Seale and Rapoport (1997), shows how an experiment and a computer-simulation-study can be used to find out what decision rule/heuristic people use in a certain optimal...

In this paper we investigate human exploration/exploitation behavior in sequential-decision making tasks. Previous studies have suggested that people are suboptimal at scheduling exploration, and heuristic decision strategies are better predictors of human choices than the optimal model. By incorporating more realistic assumptions about subject’s knowledge and limitations into models of belief ...

In this paper we investigate human exploration/exploitation behavior in a sequential-decision making task. Previous studies have suggested that people are suboptimal at scheduling exploration, and heuristic decision strategies are better predictors of human choices than the optimal model. By incorporating more realistic assumptions about subject’s knowledge and limitations into models of belief...

Recently, a number of algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies have been applied to the solution of difficult discrete optimization problems. In this paper we put these algorithms in a common framework by defining the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. A couple of paradigmatic examples of applications of these novel meta-heuristic are given, as well as a brief ove...