❖ Gabriela Ochoa is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
She holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK. Her research interests include …

The global structure of combinatorial landscapes is not fully understood, yet it is known to
impact the performance of heuristic search methods. We use a so-called local optima …

Phase transitions play an important role in understanding search difficulty in combinatorial
optimisation. However, previous attempts have not revealed a clear link between fitness …

Local Optima Networks (LONs) have been proposed as a coarsegrained model of discrete
(combinatorial) fitness landscapes, where nodes are local optima and edges are search …

We study the effect of increasing the perturbation strength on the global structure of QAP
fitness landscapes induced by Iterated Local Search (ILS). The global structure is captured …

So far, multi-objective NK landscapes have been investigated under the assumption of a
homogeneous nature of the involved objectives in terms of difficulty. However, we argue that …

The existence of sub-optimal funnels in combinatorial fitness landscapes has been linked to
search difficulty. The exact nature of these structures---and how commonly they appear---is …

Connection patterns among Local Optima Networks (LONs) can inform heuristic design for
optimisation. LON research has predominantly required complete enumeration of a fitness …

The island model allows genetic algorithms to effectively maintain diversity through
migration between multiple independent populations. Due to its flexibility and modularity, it …

We consider statistical randomness in the construction of local optima networks (LONs) and
conduct a preliminary and exploratory study into this. LONs capture a fitness landscape into …