GAUSSIAN VARIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD SEARCH FOR THE FILE TRANSFER SCHEDULING PROBLEM

Gaussian variable neighborhood search showed promising results for solving continuous optimization problems. This paper presents an implementation of this heuristic for solving one of discrete optimization problems, the file transfer scheduling problem. In order to apply this continuous optimization method for solving this discrete problem, mapping of the uncountable set of feasible solutions into a finite set is performed. For obtaining better solutions in the small neighborhood of the current solution, three different local search procedures were used. It is shown that the results obtained by Gaussian modifications are comparable with the results obtained by standard VNS based algorithms developed for combinatorial optimization. In some cases Gaussian modifications gave even better results.