Internship - Fitness landscapes of tree-search heuristics (F/M)

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description This research internship is intended for final-year Master’s students or engineering school students with an interest in combinatorial optimization, constraint programming, and stochastic (hyper-)heuristics. The project will be carried out within the BONUS team at the Inria Center of the University of Lille, in the context of an ANR-funded project (EVARISTE) conducted in collaboration with the University of Angers. The selected student will interact regularly with the various colleagues involved in the project. Solving a constraint decision problem consists in assigning a value to each of its variables such that all of its constraints are satisfied. Solutions are often sought using complete, non-polynomial search strategies based on tree exploration, which consists in successively considering variables and their possible values, with the observation that some branches of the search tree can be pruned as soon as they cannot lead to satisfiable solutions. The efficiency of these techniques depends heavily on the ordering heuristic that defines the structure of the search tree, whether in terms of variable ordering or the order in which values in the domains are explored. This tree-based search principle can also be generalized to the design of meta-algorithms or hyper-heuristics, where the choice of the order in which different algorithmic components are combined (e.g., search neighbo