Contains case studies from engineering and operations research Includes commented literature for each chapter

Contains case studies from engineering and operations research Includes commented literature for each chapter

Many advances have recently been made in metaheuristic methods, from theory to applications. The editors, both leading experts in this field, have assembled a team of researchers to contribute 21 chapters organized into parts on simulated annealing, tabu search, ant colony algorithms, general purpose studies of evolutionary algorithms, applications of evolutionary algorithms, and metaheuristics.

A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.

This book demonstrates the metaheuristic methodologies that apply to maximum diversity problems to solve them. Maximum diversity problems arise in many practical settings from facility location to social network analysis and constitute an important class of NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. In fact, this volume presents a “missing link” in the combinatorial optimization-related literature. In providing the basic principles and fundamental ideas of the most successful methodologies for discrete optimization, this book allows readers to create their own applications for other discrete optimization problems. Additionally, the book is designed to be useful and accessible to researchers and practitioners in management science, industrial engineering, economics, and computer science, while also extending value to non-experts in combinatorial optimization. Owed to the tutorials presented in each chapter, this book may be used in a master course, a doctoral seminar, or as supplementary to a primary text in upper undergraduate courses. The chapters are divided into three main sections. The first section describes a metaheuristic methodology in a tutorial style, offering generic descriptions that, when applied, create an implementation of the methodology for any optimization problem. The second section presents the customization of the methodology to a given diversity problem, showing how to go from theory to application in creating a heuristic. The final part of the chapters is devoted to experimentation, describing the results obtained with the heuristic when solving the diversity problem. Experiments in the book target the so-called MDPLIB set of instances as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of the methods.

Optimization techniques have developed into a significant area concerning industrial, economics, business, and financial systems. With the development of engineering and financial systems, modern optimization has played an important role in service-centered operations and as such has attracted more attention to this field. Meta-heuristic hybrid optimization is a newly development mathematical framework based optimization technique. Designed by logicians, engineers, analysts, and many more, this technique aims to study the complexity of algorithms and problems. Meta-Heuristics Optimization Algorithms in Engineering, Business, Economics, and Finance explores the emerging study of meta-heuristics optimization algorithms and methods and their role in innovated real world practical applications. This book is a collection of research on the areas of meta-heuristics optimization algorithms in engineering, business, economics, and finance and aims to be a comprehensive reference for decision makers, managers, engineers, researchers, scientists, financiers, and economists as well as industrialists.

The book presents eight well-known and often used algorithms besides nine newly developed algorithms by the first author and his students in a practical implementation framework. Matlab codes and some benchmark structural optimization problems are provided. The aim is to provide an efficient context for experienced researchers or readers not familiar with theory, applications and computational developments of the considered metaheuristics. The information will also be of interest to readers interested in application of metaheuristics for hard optimization, comparing conceptually different metaheuristics and designing new metaheuristics.