Restarting is a technique employed by many algorithms. For some problems, restarts improve the runtimes by orders of magnitude. This thesis considers several aspects of restarts. In addition to complexity-theoretical properties, we also study methods for constructing optimal restart strategies. On the practical side, we apply restarts to significantly improve the performance of a SAT solver.

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.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

We are proud to introduce the proceedings of the Seventh International C- ference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN VII, held in Granada, Spain, on 7–11 September 2002. PPSN VII was organized back-to-back with the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) conference, which took place in Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, in the preceding week. ThePPSNseriesofconferencesstartedinDortmund,Germany[1].Fromthat pioneering meeting, the event has been held biennially, in Brussels, Belgium [2], Jerusalem, Israel [3], Berlin, Germany [4], Amsterdam, The Netherlands [5], and Paris, France [6]. During the Paris conference, several bids to host PPSN 2002 were put forward; it was decided that the conference would be held in Granada with Juan J. Merelo Guerv ́ os as General Chairman. The scienti?c content of the PPSN conference focuses on problem-solving paradigms gleaned from natural models, with an obvious emphasis on those that display an innate parallelism, such as evolutionary algorithms and ant-colony optimization algorithms. The majority of the papers, however, concentrate on evolutionary and hybrid algorithms, as is shown in the contents of this book and itspredecessors.Thiseditionoftheconferenceproceedingshasalargesectionon applications,betheytoclassicalproblemsortoreal-worldengineeringproblems, which shows how bioinspired algorithms are extending their use in the realms of business and enterprise.

This volume LNCS 12735 constitutes the papers of the 18th International Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research, CPAIOR 2021, which was held in Vienna, Austria, in 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 30 regular papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 75 submissions. The conference program included a Master Class on the topic "Explanation and Verification of Machine Learning Models".

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN V, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 1998. The 101 papers included in their revised form were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 185 submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on convergence theory; fitness landscape and problem difficulty; noisy and non-stationary objective functions; multi-criteria and constrained optimization; representative issues; selection, operators, and evolution schemes; coevolution and learning; cellular automata, fuzzy systems, and neural networks; ant colonies, immune systems, and other paradigms; TSP, graphs, and satisfiability; scheduling, partitioning, and packing; design and telecommunications; and model estimations and layout problems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2020, held in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in September 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 55 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 122 submissions. They deal with all aspects of computing with constraints including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource allocation, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers were organized according to the following topics/tracks: technical track; application track; and CP and data science and machine learning.

This book highlights recent research on intelligent systems design and applications. It presents 100 selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA 2017), which was held in Delhi, India from December 14 to 16, 2017. The ISDA is a premier conference in the field of Computational Intelligence and brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners whose work involves intelligent systems and their applications in industry and the real world. Including contributions by authors from over 30 countries, the book offers a valuable reference guide for all researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of Computer Science and Engineering.