Handbook of Metaheuristics

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.

Jean-Yves Potvin is Professor at Universite de Montreal in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research. He is also Assistant Director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). His research integrates operations research and artificial intelligence techniques. More precisely, he is interested in the development of adaptive algorithms based on local search-based metaheuristics, genetic algorithms and neural networks to address different types of vehicle routing problems. He also works on parallel implementations of these algorithms for real-time applications, like dynamic vehicle dispatching.