Search

A recent study on the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) introduced an adaptive version of the widely used Iterated Local Search (ILS) paradigm, hybridized with a path-relinking strategy (PR). The solution method, called AILS-PR, outperformed existing meta-heuristics for the CVRP on benchmark instances. However, tests on large-scale instances of the CVRP suggested that PR was too slow, making AILS-PR less advantageous in this case. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents an Adaptive Iterated Local Search (AILS) with two phases in its search process. Both phases include the perturbation and local search steps of ILS. The main difference between them is that the reference solution in the first phase is found by the acceptance criterion, while in the second phase it is selected from a pool of the best solutions found in the search process, the so-called elite set. This algorithm, called AILS-II, is very competitive on smaller instances, outperforming the other methods from the literature with respect to the average gap to the best known solutions. Moreover, AILS-II consistently outperformed the state of the art on larger instances with up to 30,000 vertices.

Several applications have a community structure where the nodes of the same community share similar attributes. Anomaly or outlier detection in networks is a relevant and widely studied research topic with applications in various domains. Despite a significant amount of anomaly detection frameworks, there is a dearth on the literature of methods that consider both attributed graphs and the community structure of the networks. This paper proposes a community-based anomaly detection algorithm using a spectral graph-based filter that includes the network community structure into the Laplacian matrix adopted as the basis for the Fourier transform. In addition, the choice of the cutoff frequency of the filter considers the number of communities found. In computational experiments, the proposed strategy, called SpecF, showed an outstanding performance in successfully identifying even discrete anomalies. SpecF is better than a baseline disregarding the community structure, especially for networks with a higher community overlapping. Additionally, we present a case study to validate the proposed method to study the dissemination of COVID-19 in the different districts of S\~ao Jos\'e dos Campos, Brazil.

The Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HFVRP) is an important variant of the classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) that aims to find routes that minimize the total traveling cost of a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. This problem is of great interest given its importance in many industrial and commercial applications. In this paper, we present an Adaptive Iterated Local Search (AILS) heuristic for the HFVRP. AILS is a local search-based meta-heuristic that achieved good results for the CVRP. The main characteristic of AILS is its adaptive behavior that allows the adjustment of the diversity control of the solutions explored during the search process. The proposed AILS for the HFVRP was tested on benchmark instances containing up to 360 customers. The results of computational experiments indicate that AILS outperformed state-of-the-art metaheuristics on 87\% of the instances.

In 2020, Brazil was the leading country in COVID-19 cases in Latin America, and capital cities were the most severely affected by the outbreak. Climates vary in Brazil due to the territorial extension of the country, its relief, geography, and other factors. Since the most common COVID-19 symptoms are related to the respiratory system, many researchers have studied the correlation between the number of COVID-19 cases with meteorological variables like temperature, humidity, rainfall, etc. Also, due to its high transmission rate, some researchers have analyzed the impact of human mobility on the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission. There is a dearth of literature that considers these two variables when predicting the spread of COVID-19 cases. In this paper, we analyzed the correlation between the number of COVID-19 cases and human mobility, and meteorological data in Brazilian capitals. We found that the correlation between such variables depends on the regions where the cities are located. We employed the variables with a significant correlation with COVID-19 cases to predict the number of COVID-19 infections in all Brazilian capitals and proposed a prediction method combining the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) method with the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average Exogenous inputs (ARIMAX) method, which we called EEMD-ARIMAX. After analyzing the results poor predictions were further investigated using a signal processing-based anomaly detection method. Computational tests showed that EEMD-ARIMAX achieved a forecast 26.73% better than ARIMAX. Moreover, an improvement of 30.69% in the average root mean squared error (RMSE) was noticed when applying the EEMD-ARIMAX method to the data normalized after the anomaly detection.

This paper approaches the integrated lot sizing and scheduling problem (ILSSP), in which non-identical machines work in parallel with non-triangular sequence-dependent setup costs and times, setup carry-over and capacity limitation. The aim of the studied ILSSP, here called ILSSP-NT on parallel machines, is to determine a production planning and tasks sequencing that meet period demands without delay and in such a way that the total costs of production, machine setup and inventory are minimized. The dearth of literature on the ILSSP-NT, despite the increasing amount of applications in the industrial sector, mainly in the food processing industry, motivated us to conduct this study. In this paper, we propose efficient methods to solve the ILSSP-NT on parallel machines. The methods virtually consist in the hybridization of the relax-and-fix and fix-and-optimize methods with the path-relinking and kernel search heuristics. To assess how well the heuristics solve the ILSSP-NT on parallel machines, we compared their results with those of the CPLEX solver with a fixed CPU time limit. The proposed matheuristics significantly outperformed CPLEX in most of the tested instances., Comment: 32 pages, 1 appendix, submitted to European Journal of Operational Research

Metaheuristics are widely employed to solve hard optimization problems, like vehicle routing problems (VRP), for which exact solution methods are impractical. In particular, local search-based metaheuristics have been successfully applied to the capacitated VRP (CVRP). The CVRP aims at defining the minimum-cost delivery routes for a given set of identical vehicles since each vehicle only travels one route and there is a single (central) depot. The best metaheuristics to the CVRP avoid getting stuck in local optima by embedding specific hill-climbing mechanisms such as diversification strategies into the solution methods. This paper introduces a hybridization of a novel adaptive version of Iterated Local Search with Path-Relinking (AILS-PR) to the CVRP. The major contribution of this paper is an automatic mechanism to control the diversity step of the metaheuristic to allow it to escape from local optima. The results of experiments with 100 benchmark CVPR instances show that AILS-PR outperformed the state-of-the-art CVRP metaheuristics.

Online social networks such as Twitter are important platforms for spreading public opinion on a variety of subjects. The classification of users through the analysis of their posts on Twitter according to their opinion sharing can help marketing ads and political campaigns to focus on specific user groups. Community detection-based techniques are specially useful to classify Twitter users, as they do not require rule-based methods or labeled data to perform the clustering task. In this paper, we constructed networks using data related to political discussions in Brazil extracted from Twitter. We show that (i) these networks follow the power-law distribution, indicating that a few popular users are responsible for most of the "mentions" and "retweets"; (ii) the most popular tweets are viral and spread across the communities whereas most of the remaining tweets are trapped in the communities where they originated; and (iii) words associated with positive sentiments are predominant in network communities related to the Brazilian presidential elections and appear in viral tweets., Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures

Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) management aims at integrating economic, environmental and social goals to assist in the long-term planning of a company and its supply chains. There is no consensus in the literature as to whether social and environmental responsibilities are profit-compatible. However, the conflicting nature of these goals is explicit when considering specific assessment measures and, in this scenario, multi-objective optimization is a way to represent problems that simultaneously optimize the goals. This paper proposes a Lagrangian matheuristic method, called $AugMathLagr$, to solve a hard and relevant multi-objective problem found in the literature. $AugMathLagr$ was extensively tested using artificial instances defined by a generator presented in this paper. The results show a competitive performance of $AugMathLagr$ when compared with an exact multi-objective method limited by time and a matheuristic recently proposed in the literature and adapted here to address the studied problem. In addition, computational results on a case study are presented and analyzed, and demonstrate the outstanding performance of $AugMathLagr$., Comment: 45 pages. Paper accepted to European Journal of Operational Research

Graph clustering is a challenging pattern recognition problem whose goal is to identify vertex partitions with high intra-group connectivity. This paper investigates a bi-objective problem that maximizes the number of intra-cluster edges of a graph and minimizes the expected number of inter-cluster edges in a random graph with the same degree sequence as the original one. The difference between the two investigated objectives is the definition of the well-known measure of graph clustering quality: the modularity. We introduce a spectral decomposition hybridized with an evolutionary heuristic, called MOSpecG, to approach this bi-objective problem and an ensemble strategy to consolidate the solutions found by MOSpecG into a final robust partition. The results of computational experiments with real and artificial LFR networks demonstrated a significant improvement in the results and performance of the introduced method in regard to another bi-objective algorithm found in the literature. The crossover operator based on the geometric interpretation of the modularity maximization problem to match the communities of a pair of individuals was of utmost importance for the good performance of MOSpecG. Hybridizing spectral graph theory and intelligent systems allowed us to define significantly high-quality community structures., Comment: Preprint accepted for publication in Expert Systems with Applications