Subject: Local Search Study Group

From: Chris Potts <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 15:01:49 +0100 (BST)

LOCAL SEARCH STUDY GROUP
                  ________________________

The Operational Research Society is to launch a new Study Group on Local
Search.  The first meeting will be at on Wednesday 28 April at 18:00 in
Room A144 of the London School of Economics. 

The meeting will begin with talk "General Purpose Solution Techniques
for Difficult Optimisation Problems" by Alain HERTZ (Department of
Mathematics, EPF-Lausanne).  An abstract is given below.  Following the
talk, a meeting will take place to form a committee, and to decide on
aims and a programme for the proposed Study Group. 

The meeting is free to members of the Operational Research Society.

For more details contact Chris Potts:
              Tel: +44 (0)1703 593651
              E-mail: [email-masked]

________________________________________________________________________

General Purpose Solution Techniques for Difficult Optimisation Problems

by Alain HERTZ (Department of Mathematics, EPF-Lausanne, Switzerland)

Abstract:

Engineering and technology have been continuously providing examples of
difficult optimisation problems.  The general purpose heuristic
techniques used to solve these problems have progressively evolved from
constructive methods to local seach techniques (e.g., simulated
annealing, tabu search), and finally to population based methods (e.g.,
genetic algorithms, ant systems). 

While population based methods have proven to be effective in finding
regions of the search space that contain solutions of high quality,
local seach techniques are very successful in determining an optimal
solution in identified good regions of the search space.  These
complementary properties explain the current growing research interest
in the development of hybrid methods that combine both search
approaches, and offer an opportunity to create still more effective
general purpose solution techniques. 

In this talk, we first describe the basic ingredients of local seach
techniques, population based methods, and hybrid algorithms.  The use of
these general purpose solution techniques will then be illustrated on
vehicle routing and graph colouring problems.

---

From: Chris Potts <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 20:18:27 +0100 (BST)

Dear Saleh,

No, we don't have a copy of the slides: it is necessary to contact him
directly.

Regards,

Chris Potts

> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> I'd be quite interested to see Hertz's talk. From the abstract,
> it sounds quite interesting. Are those slides available from somewhere to
> retrieve or one needs to contact him directly for a copy?
> 
> Many thanks.
> 
> best wishes,
> Saleh
> 
> 
> > 
> >                   LOCAL SEARCH STUDY GROUP
> >                   ________________________
> > 
> > 
> >