Soft computing and cooperative strategies for optimization

In the last years, metaheuristics have emerged as powerful algorithmic approaches which have been applied with great success to difficult combinatorial optimization problems. However, this does not mean that metaheuristics can be applied blindly to any new problem.In this contribution we showed how the most basic ingredients of Soft Computing, namely fuzzy sets and fuzzy rules, are used in the context of a simple metaheuristic and a cooperative strategy based on it, to obtain successful results for the p-median problem.