Article ID: | iaor20042425 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 148 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 672 |
End Page Number: | 686 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2003 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Eggers Jan, Feillet Dominique, Kehl Steffen, Wagner Marc Oliver, Yannou Bernard |
Keywords: | heuristics |
In order to solve the problem of the arrangement of letters on a computer keyboard, an abstract representation of a keyboard is introduced and an evaluation function taking account of ergonomic criteria is proposed. It results in a new optimization problem that we name the keyboard arrangement problem. Based on the generic framework of Ant Colony optimization, an algorithm is developed and applied to this problem. New effective keyboard arrangements are deduced for several languages. Comparisons are made with standard manually optimized keyboards.