Social Network Optimization a New Methaheuristic for General Optimization Problems

Abstract

In the recent years metaheuristics were studied and developed as powerful technics for hard optimization problems. Some of well-known technics in this field are: Genetic Algorithms, Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Ant Colony Optimization, and Swarm Intelligence, which are applied successfully to many complex optimization problems. In this paper, we introduce a new metaheuristic for solving such problems based on social networks concept, named as Social Network Optimization – SNO. We show that a wide range of np-hard optimization problems may be solved by SNO.