Soft computing and cooperative strategies for optimization

In this paper we describe our work in the context of multi-thread, cooperative strategies to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Under our approach, we use soft computing ideas at two levels: to define the solvers or threads, and to define the rules governing the (centralized) coordination scheme. We show the results obtained regarding how the cooperative strategy behaves against a sequential and independent search scheme, and we analyze how the number of threads affects the search behavior.