Abstract
Local search heuristic that explores several neighborhood structures in a deterministic way is called variable neighborhood descent (VND). Its success is based on the simple fact that different neighborhood structures do not usually have the same local minimum. Thus, the local optima trap problem may be resolved by deterministic change of neighborhoods. VND may be seen as a local search routine and therefore could be used within other metaheuristics. In this chapter, we discuss typical problems that arise in developing VND heuristic: what neighborhood structures could be used, what would be their order, what rule of their change during the search would be used, etc. Comparative analysis of usual sequential VND variants is performed in solving traveling salesman problem.
Abraham Duarte
Full Professor
Abraham Duarte is Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence, and operations research to develop solution methods based on Computational Intelligence (metaheuristics) for practical problems in operations-management areas such as logistics and supply chains, telecommunications, decision-making under uncertainty and optimization of simulated systems.
Jesús Sánchez-Oro
Associate Professor
Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department, being one of the senior researchers of the Group for Research on Algorithms For Optimization GRAFO.