Paola Festa

Advances and trends in GRASP: from hybridizations to nonmonocity

Abstract

GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures) is a multistart metaheuristic for computing good-quality solutions of hard combinatorial optimization problems. Each GRASP iteration is usually made up of a construction phase, where a feasible solution is constructed, and a local search phase which starts at the constructed solution and applies iterative improvement until a locally optimal solution is found. Typically, the construction phase of GRASP is a randomized greedy algorithm, but other types of construction procedures have been also proposed in the literature. Repeated applications of a construction procedure yields diverse starting solutions for the local search and the best overall solution is kept as the output. This talk will give an overview of GRASP enhancements to the basic procedure, including reactive GRASP, intensification strategies, and hybridizations with other metaheuristics. It will be also described a new variant of the GRASP framework that uses a new nonmonotone strategy to explore the neighborhood of the current solution.

Short CV

Paola Festa obtained her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research in 2000 and is currently Associate Professor in Operations Research at the University of Napoli FEDERICO II, Italy.
Since 1999, she has been frequently and regularly Research Scholar at several national and international research institutions, including CNRs, MIT Lab. for Information and Decision Systems (USA), AT&T Labs Research (USA), and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the University of Florida (USA).

Paola Festa is Associate Editor of several international journals, including Journal of Global Optimization, Optimization Letters, ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics, and Journal of Biomedical Data Mining. She has been chair or member of the scientific committee of more than 50 international conferences and workshops and the organizer of more than 10 international scientific events. She is member of the Steering Committee of the International Workshops on Hybrid Metaheuristics.
She is author/co-author of more than 100 publications appeared in international journals, books, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.