Tuesday 5 June 2012, 1430 IDSIA meeting room, Galleria 1, Manno SPEAKER: Elena Rocchi, University of Bologna, Italy TITLE: Matheuristic techniques for real-world vehicle routing problems ABSTRACT: The research area concerns the design and study of matheuristic algorithms, used as solution methods for real-world problems, combinatorial in nature. Matheuristic methods come from the integration of exact components within a metaheuristic framework, chosen as a solution paradigm. The combination of exact components and metaheuristic algorithms has the purpose of exploiting the advantages of both approaches: thank to the use of the exact components, it is possible to operate effectively and to focus on some of the constraints of the problem, while, with the use of a metaheuristic framework, one can efficiently explore large areas of the search space in acceptable time. The field in which these algorithms are of interest to me is related to transportation problems. In my talk, I will introduce the problems I have directly studied, namely the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Pairwise Synchronization Constraints (VRPTWPS) and the Periodic Travelling Salesman Problem (PTSP), along with the matheuristic method realized for solving the VRPTWPS. Real world instances of this last, characterized by synchronization constraints, will be described and preliminary computational results presented.