New VNP for automatic programming

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new local search method for solving automatic programming problem and we use it within recent Variable Neighborhood Programming (VNP) method. In automatic programming area the solution is a program and the most common way is to present it by a tree T with the specific structure (i.e., it has different types of nodes). New local search tries to adapt well known “elementary tree transformation” in generating neighboring trees (programs) N (T) to the incumbent tree T. Several other neighborhoods Nk (T) are used for the shaking step of the VNP. Method is implemented on some typical problems from the literature. Results are compared with the old VNP method.