Article ID: | iaor2007320 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 17 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 111 |
End Page Number: | 122 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2005 |
Journal: | INFORMS Journal On Computing |
Authors: | Laguna Manuel, Mart Rafael, Campos Vicente |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
In this paper, we develop a general-purpose heuristic for permutations problems. The procedure is based on the scatter-search and tabu-search methodologies and treats the objective-function evaluation as a black box, making the search algorithm context-independent. Therefore, our main contribution consists of the development and testing of a procedure that uses no knowledge from the problem context to search for the optimal solution. We perform computational experiments with four well-known permutation problems to study the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. These experiments include a comparison with two commercially available software packages that are also based on meta-heuristic optimization technology and allow solutions to be represented as permutations.