Iterated Local Search (ILS) has many of the desirable features of a metaheuristic: it is simple, easy to implement, robust, and highly effective. The essential idea of ILS lies in focusing the search not on the full space of solutions but on a smaller subspace defined by the solutions that are...

The set covering problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that arises in applications ranging from crew scheduling in airlines to driver scheduling in public mass transport. In this paper we analyze search space characteristics of a widely used set of benchmark instances through...