Stochastic Local Search

By Holger Hoos and Thomas Stutzle

“The book and companion web page are well written, easy to read and suited for students, scholars, researchers and practitioners alike. We see SLS:FA as an important step towards an improved understanding of SLS methods and their behavior, and we expect that this book will inspire future researchers and spark new lines of work in this area." --Ruben Ruiz and Marco Pranzo, European Journal of Operational Research Article in Press"Hoos and Stützle, two major players in the field, provide us with an excellent overview of stochastic local search. If you are looking for a book that covers all the major metaheuristics, gives you insight into their working, and guides you in their application to a wide set of combinatorial optimization problems, this is the book. " --Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles"Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications provides an original and synthetic presentation of a large class of algorithms more commonly known as metaheuristics. Over the last 20 years, these methods have become extremely popular, often representing the only practical approach for tackling so many of the hard combinatorial problems that are encountered in real-life applications. Hoos and Stützle’s treatment of the topic is comprehensive and covers a variety of techniques, including simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms and ant colony optimization, but a main feature of the book is its proposal of a most welcome unifying framework for describing and analyzing the various methods." --Michel Gendreau, Université de Montréal"Local search algorithms are often the most practical approach to solving constraint satisfaction and optimization problems that admit no fast deterministic solution. This book is full of information and insights that would be invaluable for both researchers and practitioners." --Henry Kautz, University of Washington"This extensive book provides an authoritative and detailed exposition for novices and experts alike who need to tackle difficult decision or combinatorial optimization problems. The chapters span fundamental theoretical questions such as, “When and why do heuristics work well?” but also more applied aspects involving, for instance, the comparison of very different algorithms. The authors are university faculty members and leading players in their research fields; our communities will enjoy in particular their books’ valuable teaching material and a “complete” bibliography of the state of the art for the field." --Olivier Martin, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay"The authors provide a lucid and comprehensive introduction to the large body of work on stochastic local search methods for solving combinatorial problems. The text also covers a series of carefully executed empirical studies that provide significant further insights into the performance of such methods and show the value of an empirical scientific methodology in the study of algorithms. An excellent overview of the wide range of applications of stochastic local search methods is included." --Bart Selman, Cornell University"Stochastic local search is a powerful search technique for solving a wide range of combinatorial problems. If you only want to read one book on this important topic, you should read Hoos and Stützle’s. It is a comprehensive and informative survey of the field that will equip you with the tools and understanding to use stochastic local search to solve the problems you come across." --Toby Walsh, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, University College Cork

• Part I. Foundations1. Introduction2. SLS Methods3. Generalized Local Search Machines4. Empirical Analysis of SLS Algorithms5. Search Space Structure and SLS PerformancePart II. Applications6. SAT and Constraint Satisfaction7. MAX-SAT and MAX-CSP8. Traveling Salesman Problems9. Scheduling Problems10. Other Combinatorial Problems