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Control Abstractions for Local Search

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Abstract

Comet is an object-oriented language supporting a constraint-based architecture for local search through declarative and search components. This paper proposes three novel and lightweight control abstractions for the search component, significantly enhancing the compositionality, modularity, and reuse of Comet programs. These abstractions, which includes events and checkpoints, rely on first-class closures as the enabling technology. They are especially useful for expressing, in a modular way, heuristic and meta-heuristics, unions of heterogeneous neighborhoods, and sequential composition of neighborhoods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brown University, Box 1910, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Pascal Van Hentenryck

  2. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269-2155, USA

    Laurent Michel

Authors
  1. Pascal Van Hentenryck
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  2. Laurent Michel
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Correspondence to Pascal Van Hentenryck.

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Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L. Control Abstractions for Local Search. Constraints 10, 137–157 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-005-0553-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-005-0553-x

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