Rafael Martí

My main research interest focuses on the development of solution procedures for hard optimization problems. The aim of an optimization problem is to find the value of the decision variables that maximizes or minimizes the objective function value, subject to a set of constraints. On NP-hard problems we cannot expect to be able to solve practical instances of arbitrary size to optimality. Heuristic algorithms are able to find very good solutions for hard optimization problems in short or reasonable time, although they cannot prove optimality. There are a great number and variety of difficult problems, which come up in practice and need to be solved effciently, and this has promoted the development of heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms. Alternatively, exact methods solve hard optimization problems to proven optimality. They usually limit themselves to small and medium sized instances and require longer running times than heuristic methods, but they certify the optimality of the obtained solution. I have mainly developed heuristic procedures for well-known combinatorial and continuous optimization problems. I have also worked on exact methods for some selected problems.

This web site contains a list of my publications classified according to their scope (books, journal papers or book chapters) reachable from the Publications menu above. Most of the journal papers are downloadable from the corresponding webpage.