Control abstractions for local search
COMET is an object-oriented language supporting a constraint-based architecture for local search through declarative and search components. This paper proposes three novel and lightweight control abstractions for the search component, significantly enhancing the compositionality, modularity, and reuse of COMET programs. These abstractions, which includes events and checkpoints, rely on first-class closures as the enabling technology. They are especially useful for expressing, in a modular way, heuristic and meta-heuristics, unions of heterogeneous neighborhoods, and sequential composition of neighborhoods.
control abstraction local search search heuristic neighborhood incremental constraint meta-heuristic