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Introduction

The previous sections should have convinced you that creating a heuristic is not a difficult thing to do. In fact, given any problem it should be a relatively straightforward task to create many heuristics. How should you choose among them? What makes a good heuristic and what makes a bad heuristic? There are two major qualities of a heuristic that I think are the most important. These are solution quality and time requirements. There are a number of other qualities that also might be of interest. These include flexibility, understandability, and ease of implementation. I will go through these in turn.



Michael A. Trick
Tue Oct 8 08:16:54 EDT 1996