Algorithm Engineering for some Complex Practise Problems: Exact Algorithms, Heuristics and Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms

This work deals with the design of exact algorithms and heuristics for complex optimization problems that origin from three practical applications and one classical combinatorial task. We obtain exact algorithms by modeling our problems in terms of mathematical optimization problems and applying suitable software tools to solve this models. Because of the complexity of our problems, exact algorithms cannot solve large instances within adequate time. Therefore, on the one hand, we derive efficient heuristics by adapting algorithms for similar mathematical problems in a suitable manner. On the other hand, evolutionary algorithms have shown to be successfully applicable to many hard mathematical problems. For that reason, we experimentally determine appropriate EA frameworks, hybridizing the evolutionary operators with our problem specific heuristics.