Metaheuristics for Hard Optimization: Methods and Case Studies Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Pretty shallow presentation of basic metaheuristics. For example, Simulated Annealing is covered on 20 pages, with 10 pages of examples presented without details. There is no even a block diagram of SA method or pseudocode. The reader should not expect that he/she will know how to implement SA, not saying about various pracitcal issues.

This regards almost all presented heuristics: some high-level view with some philosophy and no technicalities. Controversial is including multiobjective optimization in this book. Multiobjective optimization is pretty standard OR problem, definitely not "hard" and solved using standard OR techniques.

I don't know what is the audience this book is addressing.

"Theory" part covers about half of the book. The second part, "applications" seems to be a collection of scientific papers published by the authors elswehere. This part is more interesting, but first part doesn't give sufficient theoretical background to understand the application section.

I will definitely keep this book on my shelf, but if somebody wants to study metaeuristics, I would suggest book by Michalewicz and Fogel "How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics". Or better, both books could be considered as a combo: Michalewicz book as theoretical and technical introduction, the reviewed book as collction of sample non-trivial problems

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Product Description:

Metaheuristics for Hard Optimization comprises of three parts. The first part is devoted to the detailed presentation of the four most widely known metaheuristics:• the simulated annealing method,• tabu search,• the evolutionary algorithms,• ant colony algorithms.Each one of these metaheuristics is actually a family of methods, of which the essential elements are discussed. In the second part, the book presents some other less widespread metaheuristics, then, extensions of metaheuristics and some ways of research are described . The problem of the choice of a metaheuristic is posedand solution methods are discussed. The last part concentrates onthree case studies from telecommunications, air traffic control, and vehicle routing.

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