A hybrid heuristic approach based on a quadratic knapsack formulation for the Max-Mean dispersion problem

Abstract

The paper deals with the Max-Mean Dispersion Problem (Max - MeanDP) belonging to the general category of clustering problems. The aim of such problems is to find a subset of a set which maximizes a measure of dispersion/similarity between elements. To tackle the problem a two phases hybrid heuristic combining a mixed integer non linear solver and a local branching procedure is developed. Computational results, performed on literature instances, show that the proposed procedure outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.