URL study guide
https://tue.osiris-student.nl/onderwijscatalogus/extern/cursus?cursuscode=2IRR60&collegejaar=2025&taal=enDescription
This course has a cap of 125 students. Students will be admitted on a first-come-first-served basis. Student can only register for one of the courses 2IRR60, 2IRR70 and 2IRR80There are various algorithms and algorithmic techniques that allow us to efficiently solve algorithmic problems with guarantees on both the solution quality and the running time of the algorithms. However, there are also algorithmic problems that are provenly hard and for which we cannot provide such guarantees in general. These problems are often encountered in practice and good solutions are required for practical applications, regardless of the fact that we cannot provide any guarantees on these solutions. In this course we cover heuristic algorithmic techniques for optimization problems that cannot provide guarantees on the computed solutions, but do have strong theoretical foundations, including local search, simulated annealing, and evolutionary algorithms. Furthermore, we cover tools that can be used to solve hard problems optimally, but without any guarantees on the running time of the algorithm, including ILP solvers and SAT solvers. Finally, we cover how the performance of algorithms can be evaluated experimentally, in the absence of any formal guarantees.
Objectives
After the course, the student… understands various heuristic techniques and their theoretical foundations
… can apply various heuristic techniques to hard optimization problems
… can formulate hard optimization problems as ILP or SAT problems and can solve them using ILP and SAT solvers
… can reason about the relative effectiveness and efficiency of different heuristic techniques for a given problem
… can implement various heuristic techniques and experimentally evaluate their effectiveness and efficiency for a given problem on provided datasets