This book is dedicated to metaheuristics as applied to vehicle routing problems. Several implementations are given as illustrative examples, along with applications to several typical vehicle routing problems. As a first step, a general presentation intends to make the reader more familiar with the related field of logistics and combinatorial optimization. This preamble is completed with a description of significant heuristic methods classically used to provide feasible solutions quickly, and local improvement moves widely used to search for enhanced solutions. The overview of these fundamentals allows appreciating the core of the work devoted to an analysis of metaheuristic methods for vehicle routing problems. Those methods are exposed according to their feature of working either on a sequence of single solutions, or on a set of solutions, or even by hybridizing metaheuristic approaches with others kind of methods.

In a unified and carefully developed presentation, this book systematically examines recent developments in VRP. The book focuses on a portfolio of significant technical advances that have evolved over the past few years for modeling and solving vehicle routing problems and VRP variations. Reflecting the most recent scholarship, this book is written by one of the top research scholars in Vehicle Routing and is one of the most important books in VRP to be published in recent times.

Metaheuristics exhibit desirable properties like simplicity, easy parallelizability, and ready applicability to different types of optimization problems. After a comprehensive introduction to the field, the contributed chapters in this book include explanations of the main metaheuristics techniques, including simulated annealing, tabu search, evolutionary algorithms, artificial ants, and particle swarms, followed by chapters that demonstrate their applications to problems such as multiobjective optimization, logistics, vehicle routing, and air traffic management. The authors are leading researchers in this domain, with considerable teaching and applications experience, and the book will be of value to industrial practitioners, graduate students, and research academics.

This book describes the potentialities of metaheuristics for solving production scheduling problems and the relationship between these two fields. For the past several years, there has been an increasing interest in using metaheuristic methods to solve scheduling problems. The main reasons for this are that such problems are generally hard to solve to optimality, as well as the fact that metaheuristics provide very good solutions in a reasonable time. The first part of the book presents eight applications of metaheuristics for solving various mono-objective scheduling problems. The second part is itself split into two, the first section being devoted to five multi-objective problems to which metaheuristics are adapted, while the second tackles various transportation problems related to the organization of production systems. Many real-world applications are presented by the authors, making this an invaluable resource for researchers and students in engineering, economics, mathematics and computer science. Contents 1. An Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for Solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problems with Sequence-dependent Family Setup Times, Mansour Eddaly, Bassem Jarboui, Radhouan Bouabda, Patrick Siarry and Abdelwaheb Rebaï. 2. Genetic Algorithms for Solving Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems, Imed Kacem. 3. A Hybrid GRASP-Differential Evolution Algorithm for Solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problems with No-Wait Constraints, Hanen Akrout, Bassem Jarboui, Patrick Siarry and Abdelwaheb Rebaï. 4. A Comparison of Local Search Metaheuristics for a Hierarchical Flow Shop Optimization Problem with Time Lags, Emna Dhouib, Jacques Teghem, Daniel Tuyttens and Taïcir Loukil. 5. Neutrality in Flow Shop Scheduling Problems: Landscape Structure and Local Search, Marie-Eléonore Marmion. 6. Evolutionary Metaheuristic Based on Genetic Algorithm: Application to Hybrid Flow Shop Problem with Availability Constraints, Nadia Chaaben, Racem Mellouli and Faouzi Masmoudi. 7. Models and Methods in Graph Coloration for Various Production Problems, Nicolas Zufferey. 8. Mathematical Programming and Heuristics for Scheduling Problems with Early and Tardy Penalties, Mustapha Ratli, Rachid Benmansour, Rita Macedo, Saïd Hanafi, Christophe Wilbaut. 9. Metaheuristics for Biobjective Flow Shop Scheduling, Matthieu Basseur and Arnaud Liefooghe. 10. Pareto Solution Strategies for the Industrial Car Sequencing Problem, Caroline Gagné, Arnaud Zinflou and Marc Gravel. 11. Multi-Objective Metaheuristics for the Joint Scheduling of Production and Maintenance, Ali Berrichi and Farouk Yalaoui. 12. Optimization via a Genetic Algorithm Parametrizing the AHP Method for Multicriteria Workshop Scheduling, Fouzia Ounnar, Patrick Pujo and Afef Denguir. 13. A Multicriteria Genetic Algorithm for the Resource-constrained Task Scheduling Problem, Olfa Dridi, Saoussen Krichen and Adel Guitouni. 14. Metaheuristics for the Solution of Vehicle Routing Problems in a Dynamic Context, Tienté Hsu, Gilles Gonçalves and Rémy Dupas. 15. Combination of a Metaheuristic and a Simulation Model for the Scheduling of Resource-constrained Transport Activities, Virginie André, Nathalie Grangeon and Sylvie Norre. 16. Vehicle Routing Problems with Scheduling Constraints, Rahma Lahyani, Frédéric Semet and Benoît Trouillet. 17. Metaheuristics for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation, Qiao Zhang, Hervé Manier, Marie-Ange Manier. About the Authors Bassem Jarboui is Professor at the University of Sfax, Tunisia. Patrick Siarry is Professor at the Laboratoire Images, Signaux et Systèmes Intelligents (LISSI), University of Paris-Est Créteil, France. Jacques Teghem is Professor at the University of Mons, Belgium.

Annotation. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2010, held in Vienna, Austria, in October 2010. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions.

The main goal of this book is to provide a state of the art of hybrid metaheuristics. The book provides a complete background that enables readers to design and implement hybrid metaheuristics to solve complex optimization problems (continuous/discrete, mono-objective/multi-objective, optimization under uncertainty) in a diverse range of application domains. Readers learn to solve large scale problems quickly and efficiently combining metaheuristics with complementary metaheuristics, mathematical programming, constraint programming and machine learning. Numerous real-world examples of problems and solutions demonstrate how hybrid metaheuristics are applied in such fields as networks, logistics and transportation, bio-medical, engineering design, scheduling.

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

This book discusses all the major nature-inspired algorithms with a focus on their application in the context of solving navigation and routing problems. It also reviews the approximation methods and recent nature-inspired approaches for practical navigation, and compares these methods with traditional algorithms to validate the approach for the case studies discussed. Further, it examines the design of alternative solutions using nature-inspired techniques, and explores the challenges of navigation and routing problems and nature-inspired metaheuristic approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2007, held in Dortmund, Germany. The 14 revised full papers discuss specific aspects of hybridization of metaheuristics, hybrid metaheuristics design, development and testing. With increasing attention to methodological aspects, from both the empirical and theoretical sides, the papers show a representative sample of research in the field of hybrid metaheuristics.