Stochastic Local Search: Foundations & Applications [Hardcover]

Holger Hoos (Author), Thomas Stuetzle (Author)

List Price:	CDN$ 91.95
Price:	CDN$ 60.80 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save:	CDN$ 31.15 (34%)
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want it delivered Monday, February 13? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.

Product Details

Hardcover: 658 pages
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1 edition (Sep 16 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1558608729
ISBN-13: 978-1558608726
Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 19.2 x 3.4 cm
Shipping Weight: 1.5 Kg
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #475,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #91 in Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Theory of Computing
- #93 in Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Information Theory

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review

"The book and companion web page are well written, easy to read and suited for students, scholars, researchers and practitioners alike."
- Ruben Ruiz and Marco Pranzo, European Journal of Operational Research Article in Press

"If you are looking for a book that covers all the major metaheuristics, gives you insight into their working, and guides you in their application to a wide set of combinatorial optimization problems, this is the book. "
- Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles

"Hoos and Stützle's treatment of the topic is comprehensive and covers a variety of techniques, but a main feature of the book is its proposal of a most welcome unifying framework for describing and analyzing the various methods."
- Michel Gendreau, Université de Montréal

"This book is full of information and insights that would be invaluable for both researchers and practitioners."
- Henry Kautz, University of Washington

"This extensive book provides an authoritative and detailed exposition for novices and experts alike who need to tackle difficult decision or combinatorial optimization problems."
- Olivier Martin, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay

"The authors provide a lucid and comprehensive introduction to the large body of work on stochastic local search methods for solving combinatorial problems. An excellent overview of the wide range of applications of stochastic local search methods is included."
- Bart Selman, Cornell University

"... a comprehensive and informative survey of the field that will equip you with the tools and understanding to use stochastic local search to solve the problems you come across."
- Toby Walsh, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, University College Cork

"The book provides a unification of a broad spectrum of methods that enables concise, highly readable descriptions of theoretical and experimental results."
- David L. Woodruff, University of California, Davis

"One of the nice features of this book is that it puts some considered metaheuristics into broader perspective. It will serve as an entry point for this field for quite some time."
- Stefan Voss, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

"This book is the first in unifying the dispersed field of Stochastic Local Search (SLS) algorithms. It provides an excellent empirical scientific methodology geared towards the successful application of SLS algorithms in practice."
- European Journal of Operational Research

Book Description

This books provides the first unified view of the field

See all Product Description

Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
This introductory chapter provides the background and motivation for studying stochastic local search algorithms for combinatorial problems. Read the first page

Explore More
Concordance

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon Canada

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Share your experience with this product with others

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com ^(beta)

Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

2 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Complete Solution, Nov 24 2004

By John Matlock "Gunny" - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Stochastic Local Search: Foundations & Applications (Hardcover)

The Travelling Salesman Problem (more politically correctly called the Travelling Salesperson Problem)(How about we call it the TSP?) is a common real world problem. The problem is simplely stated: How do you find the shortest path for a travelling sales_____ to drive as he visits a series of customers.

If you're just running a few errands it's easy enough. If you're going to the supermarket, the post office, the dry cleaners, and the gas station, it's pretty easy to determine the shortest path. But then you add constraints, nearly out of gas, go to gas station first. Buying ice cream at the super market, better make it the last stop.

This is a real world problem. It is faced every day by delivery companies like the post office and air freight companies who spend huge amounts of fuel flying jet freighters around the world -- where do you put a hub, how do you schedule everything to come together.

FedEx solved this problem by running everything through Memphis. This works really well for a package going from New York to LA. It works less well for a package going from Manhattan to the Bronx. And if the package is going from London to Manchester ....

The computation of this and similar problems fall into the general category of Stochastic Local Search. And this book is the first to offer a systematic and unified treatment of SLS. Before this there were a series of technical papers, magazine articles and chapters in more general texts. The book provides the first unified view of the entire field and offers an extensive review of state-of-the-art algorithms and their applications. A companion website offers lecture slides as well as source code and Java applets for exploring and demonstrating the algorithms.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review 5.0 out of 5 stars