Operations Research Seminar
Time and Place
Spring Semester, 2009/2010 - Tuesday 14-16
Intended Audience and Prerequisites
This seminar is mainly intended for
third year undergraduate students who took the course OR1.
Course requirements
Everey student will give one or two presentations
(depending on the number of participants).
Course description
The first lectures concern general modern heuristic techniques (for
example, using a book like book `Modern heuristic
techniques for combinatorial problems' edited by C.R. Reeves.) For
example, local search techniques like Simulated Annealing
, Tabu Search ,
Genetic algorithms,
Extremal optimization,
Chained local optimization,
and Ant colony optimization.
The next lectures will include specialized algorithms for
problems like the TSP (including the Lin Kernighan
variable depth search ), bottleneck problems
such as the p-center problem ( lexicographic local search ),
synchronization of traffic lights, optimizing schedules of chemotherapy
by simulated annealing/old bachelor/threshold acceptance ,
applications of
set covering/packing/partitioning , and various heuristic
techniques for scheduling .