Web search engines are important gateways for users to access health information. This study explored whether a search interface based on the Bing API and enabled by Scatter/Gather, a well-known document-clustering technique, can improve health information searches. Forty participants without medical backgrounds were randomly assigned to two interfaces: a baseline interface that resembles typic...

The aim of this paper is to develop a parallel Scatter Search metaheuristic 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 initial set in order to classify futur...

In spite of the widespread importance of nonlinear and parametric optimization, many standard solution methods allow a large gap between local optimality and global optimality, inviting consideration of metaheuristics capable of reducing such gaps. We identify ways to apply the tabu search metaheuristic to nonlinear optimization problems from both continuous and discrete settings. The step beyo...

In this paper, we study a resource-constrained project scheduling problem in which a set of project activities have due dates. If the finish time of each one of these activities is not equal to its due date, an earliness or a tardiness cost exists for each tardy or early period. The objective is to minimize the sum of discounted weighted earliness-tardiness penalty costs of these activities. Sc...

In this paper, a new classification approach combining support vector machine with scatter search approach for hepatitis disease diagnosis is presented, called 3SVM. The scatter search approach is used to find near optimal values of SVM parameters and its kernel parameters. The hepatitis dataset is obtained from UCI. Experimental results and comparisons prove that the 3SVM gives better outcomes...

The maximum diversity problem presents a challenge to solution methods based on heuristic optimization. We undertake the development of hybrid procedures within the scatter search framework with the goal of uncovering the most effective designs to tackle this difficult but important problem. Our research revealed the effectiveness of adding simple memory structures (based on recency and frequen...

The parallel machine scheduling problem is an important and difficult problem to be considered in the real-world situations. Traditionally, this problem consists of the scheduling of a set of independent jobs on parallel machines with the aim of minimizing the maximum job completion. In today's manufacturing systems, in which both early and tardy finishing of job processing are undesired, the o...

The search methods that have been developed to investigate the optimum point of any optimization problem are suffering from some shortcomings especially that are complex and NP-hard problems. The progress that have been achieved in the filed of information technology leads to developing a new search methods called "intelligent search methods". This paper highlights hybrid genetic scatter search...