This book aims to provide a general overview of heuristic search, to present the basic steps of the most popular heuristics, and to stress their hidden difficulties as well as their opportunities. It provides a comprehensive understanding of Heuristic search, the applications of which are now...

We propose two classes for the implementation of hyper-heuristic algorithms. The first is based on constructive heuristics, whereas the second uses improvement methods. Within the latter class, a general framework is designed for the use of local search procedures and metaheuristics as low-level...

Facility location problem is one of the strategic logistical drivers within the supply chain which is a hard to solve optimization problem. In this study, we focus on the uncapacitated single-source multi-product production/distribution facility location problem with the presence of set-up cost....

This paper presents a new local search approach for solving continuous location problems. The main idea is to exploit the relation between the continuous model and its discrete counterpart. A local search is first conducted in the continuous space until a local optimum is reached. It then...

A VNS-based heuristic using both a facility as well as a customer type neighbourhood structure is proposed to solve the p-centre problem in the continuous space. Simple but effective enhancements to the original Elzinga–Hearn algorithm as well as a powerful ‘locate–allocate’ local search...

A multiphase approach that incorporates demand points aggregation, Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) and an exact method is proposed for the solution of large-scale unconditional and conditional p-median problems. The method consists of four phases. In the first phase several aggregated...