Heuristic

A heuristic is a rule of thumb, i.e. an imperfect criteria to base a decision on.

• Method which, although unable to determine a perfectly accurate solution, should produce a set of good auality approximations to exact solutions.
• Heuristics were initially based essentially on experts’ knowledge and experience and aimed to explore the search space in a particularly convenient way

Description

• Solutions to optimize combinatorial problems of to solve a satisfaction problem
• Provide better computational performance at the expense of lower accuracy

Metaheuristics

Family of searching algorithms able to define a high level heuristic used to guide other heuristics for a better evolution in the search space

The most attractive feature of a metaheuristic is that its application requires no special knowledge on the optimization problem to solve