Given a set N, a pairwise distance function d and an integer number m, the Dispersion Problems (DPs) require to extract from N a subset M of cardinality m, so as to optimize a suitable function of the distances between the elements in M. Different functions give rise to a whole family of...

Tabu search is a greatly successful metaheuristics, as illustrated through numerous publications showing its use for a range of difficult optimization problems. The tabu search literature is to a certain degree characterized by papers introducing new variations of the search, either presenting...

The primary objective of software testing is to locate bugs as many as possible in software by using an optimum set of test cases. Optimum set of test cases are obtained by selection procedure which can be viewed as an optimization problem. So metaheuristic optimizing (searching) techniques have...

This paper presents an innovative and flexible approach for recommending the number, size and composition of purchasing groups, for a set of hospitals willing to cooperate, while minimising their shared supply chain costs. This approach makes the financial impact of the various cooperation...

This paper focuses on vehicle routing problems with profits and addresses the so-called Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem. Given a set of customers with a priori known profits and demands, the objective is to find the subset of customers, for which the collected profit is maximized, and to...

Markov chain theory is proving to be a powerful approach to bootstrap finite states processes, especially where time dependence is non linear. In this work we extend such approach to bootstrap discrete time continuous-valued processes. To this purpose we solve a minimization problem to partition...