PERIOD: JANUARY Combinatorial optimization is omnipresent when addressing numerous issues in planning and managing complex systems in important areas such as transportation, logistics, production, and telecommunications, to name but a few. Location, network design, routing, scheduling, and packing are among the major problem classes encountered in addressing these issues. These problems are difficult to address, particularly when the instance size increases, and require heuristic solution methods to obtain hopefully good solutions within acceptable computation times given the corresponding decision process.

The series of lectures aims to provide a broad view of the field of heuristic solution methods applied to combinatorial optimization, from simple heuristics to local search, from meta-heuristics to matheuristics, from hybrids to parallel search methods. The lectures will present the basic concepts, the main classes of heuristic methods, and the evolution and trends of the field. Examples of applications to network design and vehicle routing problems will illustrate the concepts and support the discussions. The main topics covered: • Decisions, models, and problem solving; A brief overview of the concepts of “complexity” and “efficiency”; The concept of heuristic solution method; • Exact solution methods as heuristics; Classical heuristics; Neighbourhoods and local search; Meta-heuristics; • Neighbourhood-based meta-heuristics: GRASP, Tabu Search, Variable Neighbourhood Search, Adaptive Large Neighbourhood Search, etc.; • Population-based meta-heuristics: Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms, Swarms (e.g., ant colonies); • Hybrid meta-heuristics, cooperative search, parallel meta-heuristics. A basic text, a new edition to appear shortly: Handbook of Metaheuristics, M. Gendreau and J.-Y. Potvin (Eds), Springer, 2010.

Schedule 13/01/2020 h. 9:00-13:00 Sala Conferenze Ciminiera 15/01/2020 h. 9:00-13:00 Sala Conferenze Ciminiera 17/01/2020 h. 9:00-13:00 Sala Conferenze Ciminiera 20/01/2020 h. 9:00-13:00 Sala Conferenze Ciminiera 21/01/2020 h. 9:00-13:00 Sala Conferenze Ciminiera

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Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.