Simulated annealing and Boltzmann machines: a stochastic approach to combinatorial optimization and neural computing
A comparison of input devices in element pointing and dragging tasks
CHI '91 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
CHI '92 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Annals of Operations Research - Special issue on Tabu search
Computers and Operations Research
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization
Tabu Search
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
The Ant System Applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
FANT: Fast ant system
Adaptive memories for the Quadratic Assignment Problems
Adaptive memories for the Quadratic Assignment Problems
Designing small keyboards is hard
Theoretical Computer Science
Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
Assignment Problems
Multistart tabu search and diversification strategies for the quadratic assignment problem
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Paper: Robust taboo search for the quadratic assignment problem
Parallel Computing
Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
The problem of designing new keyboard layouts able to improve the typing speed of an average message has been widely considered in the literature of the Ergonomics domain. Empirical tests with users and simple optimization criteria have been used to propose new solutions. On the contrary, very few papers in Operations Research have addressed this optimization problem. In this paper we firstly resume the most relevant problems in keyboard design, enlightening the related Ergonomics aspects. Then we concentrate on keyboards that must be used with a single finger or stylus, like that of portable data assistant, smartphones and other small devices. We show that the underlying optimization problem is a generalization of the well-known quadratic assignment problem (QAP). We recall some of the most effective metaheuristic algorithms for QAP and we propose some non-trivial extensions to the keyboard design problem. We compare the new algorithms through computational experiments with instances obtained from word lists of the English, French, Italian and Spanish languages. We provide on the web benchmark instances for each language and the best solutions we obtained.