Search space exploration and an optimization criterion for hard design problems

International audienceThe goal of our research was to enhance local search heuristics used to construct Latin Hypercube Designs. First, we introduce the \textit{1D-move} perturbation to improve the space exploration performed by these algorithms. Second, we propose a new evaluation function $\psi_{p,\sigma}$ specifically targeting the Maximin criterion. Series of experiments with Simulated Annealing confirm that our goal was reached as the result we obtained surpasses the best scores reported in the literature. Furthermore, the $\psi_{p,\sigma}$ function seems very promising for a wide spectrum of optimization problems with the Maximin criterion