Appraising the difficulty of permutation problems using local search and prediction

The research has been conducted in the field of optimisation algorithms with a focus on techniques which find approximate good solutions and use the information from the search to learn about the complexity of the problems. Optimisation algorithms can be applied to find solutions to real-world complex problems and learning about the difficulty of problems is especially useful when tacking unknown problems. The research is applicable to combinatorial problems and many real problems can be modelled as combinatorial problems, e.g. assignment, routing, scheduling problems.