Hyper-heuristics are (meta-)heuristics that operate at a high level to choose or generate a set of low-level (meta-)heuristics to solve difficult search and optimisation problems. Evolutionary algorithms are well-known natureinspired meta-heuristics that simulate Darwinian evolution. In this article, we introduce an evolutionary-based hyper-heuristic in which a set of low-level heuristics compe...

to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis on controlled treatment trials of meta-cognitive therapy (mct) for anxiety disorders, studies were included if they employed controlled methodology and treated people above 18 years with anxiety disorders. case studies (with less than 4 cases) and single case designed studies were excluded. a comprehensive literature search identified 15 trials f...

A charged system search algorithm (CSS) is applied to the optimal cost design of water distribution networks. This algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics in physics. The CSS utilizes a number of charged particles which influence each other based on their fitness values and their separation distances considering the governing law of Coulomb. The well-known benchm...

the present study examined the effect of grouped meta-cognitive therapy on meta-cognitive beliefs of patients' suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. this research is a quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design with control group in which two groups of experiment and control are used. the present study population includes all state universities, islamic azad universities ...

The main aim of the present paper is to propose efficient multi-objective optimization algorithms (MOOAs) to tackle truss structure optimization problems. The proposed meta-heuristic algorithms are based on the firefly algorithm (FA) and bat algorithm (BA), which have been recently developed for single-objective optimization. In order to produce a well distributed Pareto front, some improvement...

The Robust Coloring Problem (RCP) is a generalization of the well-known Graph Coloring Problem where we seek for a solution that remains valid when extra edges are added. The RCP is used in scheduling of events with possible last-minute changes and study frequency assignments of the electromagnetic spectrum. This problem has been proved as NP-hard and in instances larger than 30 vertices, meta-...

Production scheduling (planning) of an open-pit mine is the procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that the highest net present value of the project achieved subject to operational constraints. The paper introduces a new and computationally less expensive meta-heuristic technique known as imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for long-term...

Earthquake time history records are required to perform dynamic nonlinear analyses. In order to provide a suitable set of such records, they are scaled to match a target spectrum as introduced in the well-known design codes. Corresponding scaling factors are taken similar in practice however, optimizing them reduces extra-ordinary economic charge for the seismic design. In the present work a ne...