Meta-heuristics have developed dramatically since their inception in the early 1980s. They have had widespread success in attacking a variety of practical and difficult combinatorial optimization problems. These families of approaches include, but are not limited to greedy random adaptive search procedures, genetic algorithms, problem-space search, neural networks, simulated annealing, tabu search, threshold algorithms, and their hybrids. They incorporate concepts based on biological evolution, intelligent problem solving, mathematical and physical sciences, nervous systems, and statistical...

Meta-heuristics have developed dramatically since their inception in the early 1980s. They have had widespread success in attacking a variety of practical and difficult combinatorial optimization problems. These families of approaches include, but are not limited to greedy random adaptive search procedures, genetic algorithms, problem-space search, neural networks, simulated annealing, tabu search, threshold algorithms, and their hybrids. They incorporate concepts based on biological evolution, intelligent problem solving, mathematical and physical sciences, nervous systems, and statistical...