LOCALIZER: A modeling language for local search

Local search is a traditional technique to solve combinatorial search probl ems and has raised much interest in recent years. The design and implementa tion of local search algorithms is not an easy task in general and may requ ire considerable experimentation and programming effort. However, contrary to global search, little support is available to assist the design and impl ementation of local search algorithms. This paper is an attempt to support the implementation of local search. It presents the preliminary design of L OCALIZER, a modeling language which makes it possible to express local sear ch algorithms in a notation close to their informal descriptions in scienti fic papers. Experimental results on our first implementation show the feasi bility of the approach.