Creativity, Soft Methods and Metaheuristics

Abstract

Some ideas, methods and tools of Creativity and Soft Methods, in connection with Metaheuristics, will be presented. The correspondent work, still going on, investigates the advantages and the utilization of creative thinking and soft Operational Research (soft OR) to resolve difficult Optimization problems and to evaluate and compare dissimilar approaches based on Metaheuristics (Mh). We believe it constitutes an innovative challenge by proposing to combine, articulate and merge diverse procedures and techniques, from different areas. Relevance, power and success of Mh are well-known for decades. But open questions are still around: the choice of a Mh? In the presence of a concrete optimisation problem - which 'effective, efficient' Mh (able to produce an 'optimal'/acceptable solution), at the cost of 'reasonable' computing time, should be selected? And after making a selection (how to do it?), there is no universal way to improve it, to elect adequate strategies or to tune its parameters. The choice of a 'good' Mh and the adjustment of the correspondent parameters suggest, or call upon innovative ideas and tools, eventually out of the specific area. Obviously, expertise and experience of the users are of great value.