Using Experimental Design to Find Effective Parameter Settings for Heuristics

  • Authors:

  • Steven P. Coy;Bruce L. Golden;George C. Runger;Edward A. Wasil

  • Affiliations:

  • Continental Airlines, HQSRT, 1600 Smith Street, Houston, TX 77002, USA;Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA;Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC 20016, USA. ewasil@american.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Heuristics
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a procedure, based on statistical design of experiments and gradient descent, that finds effective settings for parameters found in heuristics. We develop our procedure using four experiments. We use our procedure and a small subset of problems to find parameter settings for two new vehicle routing heuristics. We then set the parameters of each heuristic and solve 19 capacity-constrained and 15 capacity-constrained and route-length-constrained vehicle routing problems ranging in size from 50 to 483 customers. We conclude that our procedure is an effective method that deserves serious consideration by both researchers and operations research practitioners.