Abstract
Generally speaking, the phrase “Less is more” implies that we use as few resources as possible in doing something while providing the best possible outcome. This approach has been applied successfully in almost all the scientific and art disciplines. The idea has also been recently explored with success in solving hard optimization problems. In this chapter, we first give the main principles of the less is more approach (LIMA) in solving continuous and combinatorial Global Optimization problems, and then explain in more detail some of its successful implementations.
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Acknowledgements
The first author is partially supported by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under Award No. RC2 DSO, and by the Committee of Science of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan under the grant number AP08856034. The work of the fourth author is partially supported by the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development through the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
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A Tribute to Professor Nenad Mladenovic
We sadly announce that Professor Nenad Mladenović passed away in May 2022, before the publication of this book was completed. His sudden death from a heart attack shocked his many friends and colleagues at universities and research institutes around the globe. Nenad introduced several important ideas in Operations Research. He is known principally for his pioneering work in Variable Neighborhood Search, which was later extended to Formulation Space Search (the topic of another chapter in this book). The VNS methodology has been applied with great success on many combinatorial and global optimization problems. It is interesting that while heuristic methods have tended to become more and more complex in order to obtain a competitive edge over other heuristics, Nenad has argued for the principle of simple designs. This is the less-is-more principal, which is the topic of this chapter. Simple heuristic designs are not only competitive; they also lead to a better understanding of the underlying nature of the problem.
The passing of Nenad is a great loss to the Operations Research community. His work has stopped, but it will continue to inspire us for many years to come. Rest in peace, my good friend.
Jack Brimberg.
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Mladenović, N., Drezner, Z., Brimberg, J., Urošević, D. (2022). Less Is More Approach in Heuristic Optimization. In: Salhi, S., Boylan, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Operations Research . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96935-6_14
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