The Bananas team (project) is funded as an INRIA associate team with UTFSM, Valparaíso, Chile and CMM, Santiago, Chile.

During the last decades, impressive improvements have been achieved to solve complex combinatorial optimization problems. These problems are generally issued from real world applications and they involve more and more data and constraints. In order to tackle large scale instances and intricate problem structures, sophisticated solving techniques have been developed, combined, and hybridized to provide efficient solvers. A common idea to get more efficient and robust algorithms consists in combining several resolution paradigms in order to take advantage of their respective assets.

However, solvers or hybridizations of solvers become more and more complex: the user must select or design various solving and hybridization strategies and tune numerous parameters. To tackle this problem, Autonomous Search is a very attractive approach for designing adaptive systems with the capability of improving its solving performance by selecting and adapting its search strategies to the problem at hand. The main goal of the project is to apply the Autonomous Search approach to hybrid solver cooperations, by automating the selection and the cooperation of solvers, by tuning the cooperation parameters, and by adapting the cooperation during solving.

Our application domains are strongly related to Chilean industry and development, such as complex optimization problems occurring in the mining industry.

Calendar

[25-29/08/14] International School on Rewriting, UTFSM, Valparaíso. Visits by Pierre-Etienne Moreau and Christophe Ringeissen

[03/14] Visit to Valparaíso, Eric Monfroy and Christophe Ringeissen

[10/13] Visit to Angers, Jorge Maturana

[07/13] Visit to Angers and Nancy, Broderick Crawford

[03/13] Visit to Valparaíso, Eric Monfroy

[12/12] Joint Workshop with AutoEvol ECOS-Sud project, Valdivia, Chile

[12/12] Visit to Valparaíso, Christophe Ringeissen and Laurent Vigneron

[13/10/12] Project meeting, Nancy

[10/12] Visit to Angers and Nancy, Broderick Crawford

[09/12] Visit to Angers, Eric Monfroy

[03/12] Visit to Angers and Nancy, Eric Monfroy