Cooperative Strategies and Reactive Search: A Hybrid Model Proposal

Cooperative strategies and reactive search are very promising techniques for solving hard optimization problems, since they reduce human intervention required to set up a method when the resolution of an unknown instance is needed. However, as far as we know, a hybrid between both techniques has not yet been proposed in the literature. In this work, we show how reactive search principles can be incorporated into a simple rule-driven centralised cooperative strategy. The proposed method has been tested on the Uncapacitated Single Allocation p-Hub Median Problem, obtaining promising results. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.