Context-Independent Scatter and Tabu Search for Permutation Problems

Campos, Vicente; Laguna, Manuel; Martı́, Rafael

doi:10.1287/ijoc.1030.0057

Cited by 67 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…The scatter search methodology is used as the basic framework for our solution procedure. Although the scatter search philosophy is to take advantage of domain-specific knowledge, this methodology has been used in the past as the basis for black box procedures (e.g., for OptQuest and for the procedure to tackle permutation problems developed by Campos, Laguna and Martí, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black box scatter search for general classes of binary optimization problems

Gortázar

Duarte

Laguna

et al. 2010

Computers & Operations Research

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The purpose of this paper is to apply the scatter search methodology to general classes of binary problems. We focus on optimization problems for which the solutions are represented as binary vectors and that may or may not include constraints. Binary problems arise in a variety of settings, including engineering design and statistical mechanics (e.g., the spin glass problem). A distinction is made between two sets of general constraint types that are handled directly by the solver and other constraints that are addressed via penalty functions. In both cases, however, the heuristic treats the objective function evaluation as a black box. We perform computational experiments with four well-known binary optimization problems to study the efficiency (speed) and effectiveness (solution quality) of the proposed method. Comparisons are made against both commercial software and specialized procedures on a set of 376 instances. We chose commercial software that is similar in nature to the proposed procedure, namely, it treats the objective function as a black box and the search is based on evolutionary optimization techniques.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black box scatter search for general classes of binary optimization problems

Gortázar

Duarte

Laguna

et al. 2010

Computers & Operations Research

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“…• The R metric [13], measures how many times an element immediately follows another in x but not in y (and vice-versa):…”

Section: Surrogate Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting Diverse Distance Metrics for Surrogate-Based Optimisation of Ordering Problems

Smith

Stone

Serpell

2016

Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2016

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Surrogate-assisted optimisation has proven success in the continuous domain, but only recently begun to be explored for other representations, in particular permutations. The use of Gaussian kernel-based models has been proposed, but only tested on small problems.This case study considers much larger instances, in the experimental setting of a real-world ordering problem. We also investigate whether creating models using different distance metrics generates a diverse ensemble. Results demonstrate the following effects of use to other researchers: (i) Numerical instability in matrix inversion is a factor across all metrics, regardless of algorithm used. The likelihoood increases significantly once the models are parameterised using evolved solutions as well as the initial random population; (ii) This phase transition is also observed in different indicators of model quality. For example, predictive accuracy typically decreases once models start to include data from evolved samples. We explain this transition in terms of the distribution of samples and Gaussian kernel basis of the models; (iii) Measures of how well models predict rank-orderings are less affected; (iv) Benchmark comparisons show that using surrogate models decreases the number of evaluations required to find good solutions, without affecting quality.

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“…Previous studies have shown how even a small amount of specialization makes a significant difference in the performance of black-box optimizers. Campos, Laguna and Martí (Campos, Laguna, & Martí, 2005) developed a black-box optimization procedure for problems for which solutions are represented as permutations. Computational tests showed that their procedure outperformed the general-purpose optimizers that are not specialized to only tackle permutation problems.…”

Section: Figure 1 Schematic Representation Of the Black-box Optimizamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is not expected for blackbox methods to perform better than the state-of-the-art in any particular problem instance; however, the comparison is helpful in assessing the size of the gap between a general and a specialized procedure in each problem class. This work may be viewed as the fourth in a series of general-purpose solvers created for problems with specific types of variables: continuous variables , permutation variables (Campos, Laguna, & Martí, 2005) and binary variables (Gortázar, Duarte, Laguna, & Martí, 2010). Specifically, our interest is to develop a solver for an evaluation black box that takes as input a vector of integers.…”

Section: Figure 1 Schematic Representation Of the Black-box Optimizamentioning

confidence: 99%

A black-box scatter search for optimization problems with integer variables

et al. 2013

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The goal of this work is the development of a black-box solver based on the scatter search methodology. In particular, we seek a solver capable of obtaining high quality outcomes to optimization problems for which solutions are represented as a vector of integer values. We refer to these problems as integer optimization problems. We assume that the decision variables are bounded and that there may be constraints that require that the black-box evaluator is called in order to know whether they are satisfied. Problems of this type are common in operational research areas of applications such as telecommunications, project management, engineering design and the like. Our experimental testing includes 171 instances within four classes of problems taken from the literature. The experiments compare the performance of the proposed method with both the best context-specific procedures designed for each class of problem as well as context-independent commercial software. The experiments show that the proposed solution method competes well against commercial software and that can be competitive with specialized procedures in some problem classes.

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Context-Independent Scatter and Tabu Search for Permutation Problems

Cited by 67 publications

References 12 publications

Black box scatter search for general classes of binary optimization problems

Black box scatter search for general classes of binary optimization problems

Exploiting Diverse Distance Metrics for Surrogate-Based Optimisation of Ordering Problems

A black-box scatter search for optimization problems with integer variables

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