Solving Large-Scale Problems: A Venture into a New Dimension

Abstract

While educational programs and professional journals typically devote much of their resources to exact, mathematically elegant methods for the solution of small or modest size problems, the practitioner often encounters large-scale or massive problems for which such exact methods hold little promise. This paper discusses this phenomena and presents some thoughts as to the incorporation of guidelines through which largescale problems may be solved by means of efficient heuristic techniques. Further, these heuristics are classified and related to a fundamental set of base heuristics.