“…A metaheuristic is a framework for producing heuristics, such as Simulated Annealing (SAA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Tabu Search (TS), Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO), Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), etc. (Yokota et al, 1996;Costa & Oliveira 2001;Wu, 2001). Metaheuristics have many desirable features for becoming an excellent method: in general they are simple, easy to implement, robust and have been proven highly effective to solve hard problems.…”