Metaheuristics in Process Engineering

摘要: Heuristics are very well studied in psychology literature also. Herbert Simon îè [220](a Nobel Laureate) introduced this concept in psychology. His original, îç primary object of research was problem solving and he showed that we operate íð within what he calls bounded rationality. He coined the term, which íï denotes the situation where people seek solutions or accept choices or judgments íî that are good enoughŒ for their purposes, but could be optimized further (if íí additional resources are available). Precisely, in psychology, heuristics are simple, íì íë how people make decisions and solve problems when they face complex problems íê or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but íé in certain cases they may lead to systematic errors. There are a lot of theorized íè íç heuristics, and familiarity heuristic. ìð Though one can trace the origins of heuristics in different branches of science, ìï philosophy, or even social sciences, one can clearly see that heuristics play a major ìî role as an important method of problem solving for many complex problems. The ìí common approach across all these disciplines is to explore a fairly good number ìì ìë are decent. Thus, a heuristic can be considered as a kind of an algorithm, but one ìê that will not explore all possible states of the problem, or will begin by exploring ìé the most likely ones. As pointed earlier, purely heuristicsóbased solutions may be ìè inconsistent and often subjective. To overcome this problem, metaheuristics were ìç introduced [85]. ëðThe Greek word meta means beyondŒ or upper level. Œ Thus, one can think ëï of metaheuristics as an upper level heuristics …