New VNP for automatic programming

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.