Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Greet Vanden Berghe (KU Leuven). The title is "Vehicle routing - a focus on heuristic design".

The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, October 12 at 13:00 UTC. Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/98337053582?pwd=WnFNYnVManFScEtaMEw2dE5GSnhJZz09 Meeting ID: 983 3705 3582 Passcode: 503069

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows. Local search-based algorithms have tended towards incorporating an ever-increasing number of heuristics for different problem classes, for example all sorts of vehicle routing generalizations. These heuristics range from all-purpose `swap' and `insert' to complicated made-to-measure operators. It has become a challenge to determine the impact of individual components on an algorithm's performance. In contrast to targeting generalizing problem extensions, it may be worthwhile to focus on a problem's core when designing a basic optimization heuristic. This talk introduces a recently published local search operator for vehicle routing problems: SISRs. This heuristic is unique insofar as it seeks to induce `spatial' and `capacity' slack during a ruin phase which may subsequently be exploited in an almost-greedy recreate phase. SISRs emerged after a dedicated attempt towards solving the vehicle routing problem's most basic special case, that is the `capacitated VRP'. SISRs' quality is validated by way of demonstrating its performance across a wide and diverse range of VRP generalizations. This confirms that the basic CVRP ruin & recreate heuristic is also effective when applied to more general vehicle problems, including fleet minimization, without the need to design additional problem-specific components.

The next talk in our series will be: Clifford Stein (Columbia Uni) | October 26 | Scheduling with Speed Predictions. For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek, Mike and Guohua