One of the private line network design problems in the telecommunications industry is to interconnect a set of customer locations through a ring of end offices so as to minimize the total tariff cost and provide reliability. We develop a Tabu Search method for the problem that incorporates long...

The bandwidth packing (BWP) problem is a combinatorially difficult problem arising in the area of telecommunications. The problem consists of assigning calls to paths in a capacitated graph, such that capacities are not violated and the total profit is maximized. In this paper we discuss the...

Generically, ejection chains are methods conceived to allow solution transformations to be efficiently carried out by modifying a variable number of their components at each step of a local search algorithm. We consider a subpath ejection chain method for the vehicle routing problem (VRP) under...

Sequential meta-heuristic implementations for the irregular stock-cutting problem have highlighted a number of common problems. The literature suggests a consensus that it is more efficient to allow configurations with overlapping pieces in the solution space and to penalise these in the...

A cardinality-constrained TSP (CC-TSP) problem requires the salesman to visit at least L and at most U cities, represented by nodes of a graph. The objective of this problem is to maximize the sum of weights of nodes visited. In this paper we propose a tabu search method based on ejection chain...

The purpose of this paper is to describe TABUROUTE, a new tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with capacity and route length restrictions. The algorithm considers a sequence of adjacent solutions obtained by repeatedly removing a vertex from its current route and reinserting it...

This paper presents a tabu-search heuristic for the capacitated lot-sizing problem (CLSP) with set-up carryover. This production-planning problems allows multiple items to be produced within a time period, and setups for items to be carried over from one period to the next. Two interrelated...

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used to elicit partworth utilities for product attributes from consumers to aid in the evaluation of market potential for new products. The objective of the share-of-choice problem (a common approach to new product design) is to find the design that...

Statistical experimental design and analysis is a cornerstone for scientific inquiry that is rarely applied in reporting computational testing. This approach is employed to study the relative performance characteristics of the four leading algorithmic and heuristic alternatives to solve the...

In this paper search heuristics are developed for generic sequencing problems with emphasis on job shop scheduling. The proposed methods integrate problem specific heuristics common to Operations Research and local search approaches from Artificial Intelligence in order to obtain desirable...