Localizer: A modeling language for local search

Local search is a traditional technique to solve combinatorial search problems and has raised much interest in recent years. The design and implementation of local search algorithms is not an easy task in general and may require considerable experimentation and programming effort. However, contrary to global search, little support is available to assist the design and implementation of local search algorithms. This paper is an attempt to support the implementation of local search. It presents the preliminary design of LOCALIZER, a modeling language which makes it possible to express local search algorithms in a notation close to their informal descriptions in scientific papers. Experimental results on our first implementation show the feasibility of the approach.