EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award 2016

The winner of the 2016 EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award is:

Theoretical and Practical Contributions on Scatter Search, Variable Neighbourhood Search and Matheuristics for 0-1 Mixed Integer Programs

This work consists in results obtained studying Scatter Search (SS), Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS), and Matheuristics in both theoretical and practical contexts. The main theoretical contribution of this work is a convergent SS algorithm for 0-1 Mixed Integer Programs (MIP) along with the proof of its finite convergence. Additionally, we identify two variants of the implementation of a convergent SS algorithm. Stemming from this convergent SS algorithm several SS heuristics have been proposed and tested on some instances of 0-1 MIP. Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of these first stage methods, which makes them attractive for use in situations where very high quality solutions are sought with an efficient investment of computational effort. This work also includes new variants of VNS metaheuristic that have been successfully applied for solving NP-Hard problems arising in transportation, logistics, power generation, scheduling and clustering. On all tested problems, the proposed VNS heuristics turn out to be new state-of-the art heuristics. The last contribution of this work consists in proposing several matheuristics for solving the Fixed-Charge Multicommodity Network Design problem and finding a first feasible 0-1 MIP solution. The performances of these methods have been disclosed on the benchmark instances and the obtained results demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed methods with other approaches in the literature.

The EDDA jury 2016 consisted of Ahti Salo (chair), Richard Hartl, Bernardo Almada-Lobo, Karl Schmedders and Emilio Carrizosa.

The award was presented at the closing session of the EURO 2016 Conference in Poznań (Poland).