The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision proposes a capital adequacy framework that allows banks to calculate capital requirement for their banking books using internal assessments of key risk drivers. Hence the need for systems to assess credit risk. Among the new methods, artificial neural...

The minimum common string partition problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with applications in computational biology. In this work we propose the first integer linear programming model for solving this problem. Moreover, on the basis of the integer linear programming model we...

The probabilistic traveling salesman problem is a paradigmatic example of a stochastic combinatorial optimization problem. For this problem, recently an estimation-based local search algorithm using delta evaluation has been proposed. In this paper, we adopt two well-known variance reduction...

Pareto Local Search (PLS) is a simple and effective local search method for tackling multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. It is also a crucial component of many state-of-the-art algorithms for such problems. However, PLS may be not very effective when terminated before...

Optimisation algorithms with good anytime behaviour try to return as high-quality solutions as possible independently of the computation time allowed. Designing algorithms with good anytime behaviour is a difficult task, because performance is often evaluated subjectively, by plotting the...

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most prominent NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems. After over fifty years of intense study, the TSP continues to be of broad theoretical and practical interest. Using a novel approach to empirical scaling analysis, which in principle...

In this article, we propose UACOR, a unified ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for continuous optimization. UACOR includes algorithmic components from ACOR,DACOR and IACOR-LS, three ACO algorithms for continuous optimization that have been proposed previously. Thus, it can be used to...

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

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...