Commonly there are two types of local search approaches known to treat combinatorial optimization problems with very complex search-space structure: One is to introduce very complicated types of local move classes, allowing a bypass of high energetic barriers separating different minima. The...

For many years, the problem of how to distribute students to the various universities in Germany according to the preferences of the students has remained unsolved. Various approaches, like the centralized method to let a central agency organize the distribution to the various universities or...

Search space smoothing and related heuristic optimization algorithms provide an alternative approach to simulated annealing and its variants: while simulated annealing traverses barriers in the energy landscape at finite temperatures, search space smoothing intends to remove these barriers, so...