V. Campos, M. Laguna, and R. Martí
INFORMS Journal on Computing, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 111-122 (2005)
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.
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