Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms. Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics

Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are established tools for the solution of computationally hard problems arising in computer science, business adm- istration, engineering, biology, and various other disciplines. To a large extent, their success is due to their conceptual simplicity, broad applicability and high performance for many important problems studied in academia and enco- tered in real-world applications. SLS methods include a wide spectrum of te- niques, ranging from constructiv