A constructive heuristic is a type of
heuristic
A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...
method which starts with an empty solution and repeatedly extends the current solution until a complete solution is obtained. It differs from local search heuristics which start with a complete solution and then try to improve the current solution further via local moves. Examples of some famous problems that are solved using constructive heuristics are the
flow shop scheduling
Flow-shop scheduling is an optimization problem in computer science and operations research. It is a variant of optimal job scheduling. In a general job-scheduling problem, we are given ''n'' jobs ''J''1, ''J''2, ..., ''Jn'' of varyi ...
, the
vehicle routing problem
The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a combinatorial optimization and integer programming problem which asks "What is the optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles to traverse in order to deliver to a given set of customers?" It generalises t ...
and the open shop problem.
See also
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Evolutionary algorithms
In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduc ...
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Genetic algorithms
In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to gene ...
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Local search (optimization)
In computer science, local search is a heuristic method for solving computationally hard optimization problems. Local search can be used on problems that can be formulated as finding a solution maximizing a criterion among a number of candidate so ...
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Metaheuristics
In computer science and mathematical optimization, a metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure or heuristic designed to find, generate, or select a heuristic (partial search algorithm) that may provide a sufficiently good solution to an optimiza ...
References
{{Reflist
Optimization algorithms and methods
Heuristics