The genomic median problem is an optimization problem inspired by a biological issue: it aims to find the chromosome organization of the common ancestor to multiple living species. It is formulated as the search for a genome that minimizes a rearrangement distance measure among given genomes. Several attempts have been reported for solving this NP-hard problem. These range from simple heuristic...

In this paper, we propose an effective microaggregation algorithm to produce a more useful protected data for publishing. Microaggregation is mapped to a clustering problem with known minimum and maximum group size constraints. In this scheme, the goal is to cluster n records into groups of at least k and at most 2k_1 records, such that the sum of the within-group squ...

Random k-CNF formulas at the anticipated k-SAT phasetransition point are prototypical hard k-SAT instances. We develop a stochastic local search algorithm and study it both theoretically and through a large-scale experimental study. The algorithm comes as a result of a systematic study that contrasts rates at which a certain measure concentration phenomenon occurs. This study yields a new stoch...

GRASP with path-relinking is a hybrid metaheuristic, or stochastic local search (Monte Carlo) method, for combinatorial optimization. A restart strategy in GRASP with path-relinking heuristics is a set of iterations {i1, i2, . . .} on which the heuristic is restarted from scratch using a new seed for the random number generator. Restart strategies have been shown to speed up stochastic local se...

Metaheuristics and local search algorithms have received considerable attention as promising methods for tackling stochastic combinatorial optimization problems. However, in stochastic settings, these algorithms are usually simple extensions of the versions that are originally designed for deterministic optimization and often they lack rigorous integration with techniques that handle the stocha...