Metaheuristics in the Service Industry

This book presents novel methodological approaches and improved results of metaheuristics for modern services. It examines applications in the area of transportation and logistics, while other areas include production and financial services.

Most developed economics show the tendency of an increasing importance of modern services such as tourism, logistical services, finance, and others. In many cases, complex optimization problems can be found in this context, and the successful operation of modern services often depends on the ability to solve the obtained optimization models. Metaheuristics on the other hand present an interesting problem-resolution paradigm that has attracted considerable interest in past years. The book combines a set of selected and peer-reviewed articles, presenting novel results of metaheuristics for modern services. In particular, applications in the area of transportation and logistics are considered, while other areas include production and financial services. Novel methodological approaches as well as improved results are obtained, resulting in a considerable contribution to the state-of-the-art of research in metaheuristics.

Contenu
A Bicriteria Traveling Salesman Problem with Sequence Priorities.- Metaheuristics for Tourist Trip Planning.- Solving Fuzzy Multi-Item Economic Order Quantity Problems via Fuzzy Ranking Functions and Particle Swarm Optimization.- Fixed and Variable Toll Pricing in Road Networks with Direct Search Meta-Heuristics.- Scatter Search for locating a treatment plant and the necessary transfer centers in a reverse network.- Variable Neighbourhood Descent for Planning Crane Operations in a Train Terminal.- Design and Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms for the No-wait Flow-shop Scheduling Problem.- Metaheuristics for the Index Tracking Problem.- A Hybrid Algorithm for Vehicle Routing of Less-Than-Truckload Carriers.