Generic metaheuristics application to industrial engineering problems

Metaheuristics subsume heuristic methods that are defined in a generic way with the key ideas independent from problem specific aspects. Accordingly, a nice way for problem solving would be to select and apply some appropriate method from a heuristics stockroom that provides ready-to-use software components incorporating respective methods. Thus, we are faced with the task to build reusable software components. In this paper we describe an object-oriented framework for heuristic search and discuss some experiences concerning the application of this framework.