A rationale for heuristic program selection and evaluation

Abstract

In the past, great claims have been set forth as to the potential of the heuristic procedure or "heuristic programming," References 1 and 2. As early as 1958 Simon and Newell, Reference 2, wrote of "Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research." However, and this is strictly the opinion of the authors (although it is shared by most others we have discussed the matter with), rather than seeing a relative increase in heuristic program solution techniques in the literature, the converse appears to be true. Most of the journals dealing with operations research, management science, industrial engineering, and related fields have evolved (or perhaps dissolved, depending on one's point of view) into journals of mathematics, or perhaps abstract mathematics. The fundamental idea of engineering as being directed toward real world applications often seems to have been lost. As a result, we (industrial engineers/operations researchers) are now caustically described as pseudo-mathematicians, and the field has been defined as the "science of providing elegant solutions to trivial problems." OR has even been credited with such things as our poor performance and defeats in the Indo-China war, Reference 5, cost overruns on defense contracts and so on. Such criticism comes from both outside and within our profession, References 3, 4, 5.

Utilising Abstract Matching to Preserve the Nature of Heuristics in Design Optimisation

“…They don't guarantee that it will work, simply that it might. This fallibility of heuristics led to the perception that the use of heuristics is a flawed approach, especially when contrasted with algorithmic approaches [5,13].…”