Haiku - a Scala combinator toolkit for semi-automated composition of metaheuristics

There is an emerging trend towards the automated design of metaheuristics at the software component level. In principle, metaheuristics have a relatively clean decomposition, where well-known frameworks such as ILS and EA are parametrised by variant components for acceptance, perturbation etc. Automated generation of these frameworks is not so simple in practice, since the coupling between components may be implementation specific. Compositionality is the ability to freely express a space of designs ‘bottom up’ in terms of elementary components: previous work in this area has used combinators, a modular and functional approach to componentisation arising from foundational Computer Science. In this article, we describeHaiku, a combinator tool-kit written in the Scala language, which builds upon previous work to further automate the process by automatically composing the external dependencies of components. We provide examples of use and give a case study in which a programatically-generated heuristic is applied to the Travelling Salesman Problem within an Evolutionary Strategies framework

Decomposing metaheuristic operations

Non-exhaustive local search methods are fundamental tools in applied branches of computing such as operations research, and in other applications of optimisation. These problems have proven stubbornly resistant to attempts to nd generic meta-heuristic toolkits that are both expressive and computationally e cient for the large problem spaces involved. This paper complements recent work on functional abstractions for local search by examining three fundamental operations on the states that characterise allowable and/or intermediate solutions. We describe how three fundamental operations are related, and how these can be implemented e ectively as part of a functional local search library

Containers in Software Development : A Systematic Mapping Study

Peer reviewe