Supply chain management: An opportunity for metaheuristics

In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain. We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.Supply chain management, metaheuristics, iterated local search, tabu search and scatter search

Automated Design of Metaheuristic Algorithms: A Survey

Metaheuristics have gained great success in academia and practice because their search logic can be applied to any problem with available solution representation, solution quality evaluation, and certain notions of locality. Manually designing metaheuristic algorithms for solving a target problem is criticized for being laborious, error-prone, and requiring intensive specialized knowledge. This gives rise to increasing interest in automated design of metaheuristic algorithms. With computing power to fully explore potential design choices, the automated design could reach and even surpass human-level design and could make high-performance algorithms accessible to a much wider range of researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a broad picture of automated design of metaheuristic algorithms, by conducting a survey on the common grounds and representative techniques in terms of design space, design strategies, performance evaluation strategies, and target problems in this field

Metaheuristic Optimization Frameworks: a Survey and Benchmarking

This paper performs an unprecedented comparative study of Metaheuristic optimization frameworks. As criteria for comparison a set of 271 features grouped in 30 characteristics and 6 areas has been selected. These features include the different metaheuristic techniques covered, mechanisms for solution encoding, constraint handling, neighborhood specification, hybridization, parallel and distributed computation, software engineering best practices, documentation and user interface, etc. A metric has been defined for each feature so that the scores obtained by a framework are averaged within each group of features, leading to a final average score for each framework. Out of 33 frameworks ten have been selected from the literature using well-defined filtering criteria, and the results of the comparison are analyzed with the aim of identifying improvement areas and gaps in specific frameworks and the whole set. Generally speaking, a significant lack of support has been found for hyper-heuristics, and parallel and distributed computing capabilities. It is also desirable to have a wider implementation of some Software Engineering best practices. Finally, a wider support for some metaheuristics and hybridization capabilities is needed

MO-ParamILS: A Multi-objective Automatic Algorithm Configuration Framework

International audienceAutomated algorithm configuration procedures play an increasingly important role in the development and application of algorithms for a wide range of computationally challenging problems. Until very recently, these configuration procedures were limited to optimising a single performance objective, such as the running time or solution quality achieved by the algorithm being configured. However, in many applications there is more than one performance objective of interest. This gives rise to the multi-objective automatic algorithm configuration problem, which involves finding a Pareto set of configurations of a given target algorithm that characterises trade-offs between multiple performance objectives. In this work, we introduce MO-ParamILS, a multi-objective extension of the state-of-the-art single-objective algorithm configuration framework ParamILS, and demonstrate that it produces good results on several challenging bi-objective algorithm configuration scenarios compared to a base-line obtained from using a state-of-the-art single-objective algorithm configurator

Workload Equity in Vehicle Routing Problems: A Survey and Analysis

Over the past two decades, equity aspects have been considered in a growing number of models and methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Equity concerns most often relate to fairly allocating workloads and to balancing the utilization of resources, and many practical applications have been reported in the literature. However, there has been only limited discussion about how workload equity should be modeled in VRPs, and various measures for optimizing such objectives have been proposed and implemented without a critical evaluation of their respective merits and consequences. This article addresses this gap with an analysis of classical and alternative equity functions for biobjective VRP models. In our survey, we review and categorize the existing literature on equitable VRPs. In the analysis, we identify a set of axiomatic properties that an ideal equity measure should satisfy, collect six common measures, and point out important connections between their properties and those of the resulting Pareto-optimal solutions. To gauge the extent of these implications, we also conduct a numerical study on small biobjective VRP instances solvable to optimality. Our study reveals two undesirable consequences when optimizing equity with nonmonotonic functions: Pareto-optimal solutions can consist of non-TSP-optimal tours, and even if all tours are TSP optimal, Pareto-optimal solutions can be workload inconsistent, i.e. composed of tours whose workloads are all equal to or longer than those of other Pareto-optimal solutions. We show that the extent of these phenomena should not be underestimated. The results of our biobjective analysis are valid also for weighted sum, constraint-based, or single-objective models. Based on this analysis, we conclude that monotonic equity functions are more appropriate for certain types of VRP models, and suggest promising avenues for further research.Comment: Accepted Manuscrip

The software project scheduling problem: A scalability analysis of multi-objective metaheuristics

Applied Soft Computing 15, 136-148Computer aided techniques for scheduling software projects are a crucial step in the software development process within the highly competitive software industry. The Software Project Scheduling (SPS) problem relates to the decision of who does what during a software project lifetime, thus involving mainly both people-intensive activities and human resources. Two major conflicting goals arise when scheduling a software project: reducing both its cost and duration. A multi-objective approach is therefore the natural way of facing the SPS problem. As companies are getting involved in larger and larger software projects, there is an actual need of algorithms that are able to deal with the tremendous search spaces imposed. In this paper, we analyze the scalability of eight multi-objective algorithms when they are applied to the SPS problem using instances of increasing size. The algorithms are classical algorithms from the literature (NSGA-II, PAES, and SPEA2) and recent proposals (DEPT, MOCell, MOABC, MO-FA, and GDE3). From the experimentation conducted, the results suggest that PAES is the algorithm with the best scalability features.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) under contract TIN2008-06491-C04 (M* project). Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the ERDF under contracts TIN2012-30685 (BIO project) and TIN2011-28194 (roadME project). Fundación Valhondo, for the economic support offered to David L. González-Álvarez