The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

This volume constitutes the post- conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search, ICVNS 2019, held in Rabat, Morocco, in October 2019. The 13 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The papers describe recent advances in methods and applications of variable neighborhood search.

Meta-Heuristics: Advances and Trends in Local Search Paradigms for Optimizations comprises a carefully refereed selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Second Meta-Heuristics Conference (MIC 97). The selected articles describe the most recent developments in theory and applications of meta-heuristics, heuristics for specific problems, and comparative case studies. The book is divided into six parts, grouped mainly by the techniques considered. The extensive first part with twelve papers covers tabu search and its application to a great variety of well-known combinatorial optimization problems (including the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and vehicle routing problems). In the second part we find one paper where tabu search and simulated annealing are investigated comparatively and two papers which consider hybrid methods combining tabu search with genetic algorithms. The third part has four papers on genetic and evolutionary algorithms. Part four arrives at a new paradigm within meta-heuristics. The fifth part studies the behavior of parallel local search algorithms mainly from a tabu search perspective. The final part examines a great variety of additional meta-heuristics topics, including neural networks and variable neighbourhood search as well as guided local search. Furthermore, the integration of meta-heuristics with the branch-and-bound paradigm is investigated.

1. Introduction -- 2. Computational complexity -- 3. Local improvement on discrete structures -- 4. Simulated annealing -- 5. Tabu search -- 6. Genetic algorithms -- 7. Artificial neural networks -- 8. The traveling salesman problem: A case study -- 9. Vehicle routing: Modern heuristics -- 10. Vehicle routing: Handling edge exchanges -- 11. Machine scheduling -- 12. VLSI layout synthesis -- 13. Code design.

This book provides both the research and practitioner communities with a comprehensive coverage of the metaheuristic methodologies that have proven to be successful in a wide variety of real-world problem settings. Moreover, it is these metaheuristic strategies that hold particular promise for success in the future. The various chapters serve as stand alone presentations giving both the necessary background underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation.

Finding exact solutions to many combinatorial optimization problems in busi ness, engineering, and science still poses a real challenge, despite the impact of recent advances in mathematical programming and computer technology. New fields of applications, such as computational biology, electronic commerce, and supply chain management, bring new challenges and needs for algorithms and optimization techniques. Metaheuristics are master procedures that guide and modify the operations of subordinate heuristics, to produce improved approx imate solutions to hard optimization problems with respect to more simple algorithms. They also provide fast and robust tools, producing high-quality solutions in reasonable computation times. The field of metaheuristics has been fast evolving in recent years. Tech niques such as simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, scatter search, greedy randomized adaptive search, variable neighborhood search, ant systems, and their hybrids are currently among the most efficient and robust optimization strategies to find high-quality solutions to many real-life optimiza tion problems. A very large nmnber of successful applications of metaheuristics are reported in the literature and spread throughout many books, journals, and conference proceedings. A series of international conferences entirely devoted to the theory, applications, and computational developments in metaheuristics has been attracting an increasing number of participants, from universities and the industry.

With advancing technology and the digitization of the modern era, businesses are required to adopt the latest innovations computer science and information technology have to offer. The field of home healthcare must utilize the finest available operations management systems in order to remain relevant in a globalized world while also providing the best treatment possible to its patients. Transportation, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management in Home Healthcare: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that provides theoretical and empirical research on logistics management and transportation and scheduling routing and their applications in home healthcare and logistics. While highlighting topics such as hybrid energy, scheduling optimization, and forecasting techniques, this book is ideally designed for outpatient doctors and nurses, transportation professionals, logisticians, home healthcare managers, computer scientists, logistic engineers, health practitioners, academicians, researchers, and students.