Hybridizations of Metaheuristics With Branch & Bound Derivates

An important branch of hybrid metaheuristics concerns the hybridization with branch & bound derivatives. In this chapter we present examples for two different types of hybridization. The first one concerns the use of branch & bound features within construction-based metaheuristics in order to increase their efficiancy. The second example deals with the use of a metaheuristic, in our case a memetic algorithm, in order to increase the efficiancy of branch & bound, respectively branch & bound derivatives such as beam search. The quality of the resulting hybrid techniques is demonstrated by means of the application to classical string problems: the longest common subsequence problem and the shortest common supersequence problem.