AntPlan is a new generation software tool for real time planning and simulation of industrial production. All production stages can be optimised, monitored and controlled, and simulated in order to rapidly increase its performance. It can be either used as an automated planner, fully integrated in the production process, or as a support tool to assist decision making at the management level. AntPlan can optimize production thanks to an advanced scheduling algorithm, which can also handle unexpected events (new orders, unprogrammed maintenance, breakdowns) within a few seconds of computation. AntPlan offers a wide array of visualisation options, including Gantt charts. AntPlan can also simulate alternative production scenarios, in order to define plans that are efficient and robust.

AntOptima offers more and more services to its customers in line with the market requirements through consulting activity and in collaboration with important companies in the field of transportations and logistics at a national and international level.

Carnini, born in the '30 as a milk station, developed and broadened its business in the following years since to arrive at the beginnings of the '90 to diversify its activity and to offer different typologies of products derived from milk but not only. It has about 4.500 customers situated in West Lombardia and East Piemonte, represented for 70% from the GDO and for the remaining 30% from the detail. Based on historical data available and considering the particular features of the distributive process, Carnini, thanks to AntRoute, decided to reorganize the goods distribution itineraries minimizing the number of vehicles used. The goal is to analyze periodically Carnini distributive process in order to find out margin of enhancement/improvements and to agree by the utilization of sophisticated technical of optimization to improve the fleet efficiency. The same technologies will be used as a simulation tool to evaluate the costs and the risks associated to alternate distribution sceneries.

In the context of the CityPort European project for the urban distribution of goods in the City of Parma, AntOptima develops OptiPark, an innovative client/server system for the dynamic optimization of parking bays in the centre of the city of Parma. A number of dedicated parking bays are spread in the city centre in order to perform the delivery operations as close as possible to the destination points (shops, mini-markets, etc). Every day, transportation operators try to access autonomously these parking bays, but it often happens that when an operator arrives at a parking bay, he cannot use it because someone else has already taken it. In this case, either the operator stands by the bay waiting for his turn (possibly causing traffic jams) or he goes on performing other deliveries in the city (if any) before coming back and trying again to park (thus increasing the traffic flow). Actually, there is also the possibility that the operator does not wait and performs anyway the delivery (without using the dedicated bay), but this again could lead to traffic jams. Hence, the main problem is the lack of coordination between the transportation operators when they act autonomously. OptiPark is a tool that allows managing such a coordination providing the possibility of booking the parking bay using a standard web browser. Any transportation operator can have an overview of the occupation of the bays along the day as well as make bay reservations for his own needs.

SEAMLESS, an EU FP6 Integrated Project, aims at generating an integrated framework of computer models. This framework can be used for assessment of how future alternative agricultural and environmental polices affect sustainable development in Europe. The Integrated Project SEAMLESS aims at the generation of an integrated framework with computer models and approaches for ex-ante assessment of alternative agricultural and environmental policy options for sustainable development in Europe. The project has been set up in response to a research and policy need formulated by the European Commission. SEAMLESS proposes an integrated and operational framework, SEAMLESS-IF. This computer system will include quantitative models that simulate effects of the biophysical environment and economic developments, next to procedures that enable assessment of the qualitative aspects such as quality of life and visual landscape quality. The latest developments in Information Technology (IT) will facilitate the integration of models from a wide range of scientific domains. Interactive identification of the key indicators (e.g. for environmental pollution, economic performance or social acceptability) that can capture the relevant information associated with specific policy questions will be crucial.

Number 1 Logistics Group is Italian logistic broker leader in grocery with 400.000.000 of necks managed, 2.500.000 delivers for about 2.100.000 tons, 250.000.000 of km traveled in a year, 2.600 vehicles and 110.000 customers served. At the beginning its activity was born to distribute Barilla's products in different depots and supermarkets and to transport the grain from the production areas to the productive sites. Once activated this logistic process, it has thought to develop it by offering the same service to other companies that should transport goods in the same depots and in the same supermarkets. Number 1 chose AntOptima for the automatization of the route creation phase and for the optimization of the goods distribution. The goal is to maximize the transportations efficiency respecting the constraints on the opening time of the different depots and the limits established from the law on the travel times of each vehicle. The routes considered cover the whole Italy with services in one, two and sometimes three days.

Migros is the most important supermarkets chain in Switzerland. It manages 600 point of sales everyday. The vehicles fleet is composed of 150 - 200 non-homogeneous vehicles, i.e. vehicles with different features in term of length, number of axles, and weight; these features constrain the range of road types and shop locations which can be visited by a given truck. Visits to Migros' shops are also constrained in time, since deliveries to the shops' stores must be made within a specified time window, agreed in advance with the store management. Recently Migros decided to centralise colonial goods distribution in the new hub store located in Suhr, closing the seven regional centers. This project changed the distribution scenery: from seven centers that distributed goods locally has passed to a unique logistic center with the goal to distribute directly in the whole Switzerland. AntRoute is a system that automatically optimizes the routes of the trucks leaving Migros hub distribution centers. AntRoute is a breakthrough product in the field of vehicle routing applications. It is based on the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic which can solve in a few minutes the problem of the proper sequencing of hundreds of freight deliveries.

With many years of experience, Pina Petroli SA is now a constant presence in Ticino economy. The development that the company knew from 1949, year of its foundation, is quite visible in the dimension of the depot of Grancia, with fifteen great tanks, twelve vehicles and thirty employees. These technical and human resources make Pina Petroli a leader in the area, profit in heating oil distribution in whole Ticino and Grigioni southern valley. Everyday Pina Petroli carries out hundred of deliveries, satisfying the customers' needs and their details. Since always Pina Petroli looks with trust at the new technologies. For this reason Pina Petroli chose AntOptima to develop new technologies in order to optimize transportations and to serve the customer with always greater efficiency and precision.

The Metaheuristics Network is a project sponsored by the Improving Human Potential program of the European Community (HPRN-CT-1999-00106). The activities of the Metaheuristics Network started in September 2000 and were accomplished in August 2004. Nowadays metaheuristics are widely used to solve important practical combinatorial optimization problems. However, due to the variety of techniques and concepts comprised by metaheuristics, there is still no commonly agreed definition for metaheuristics. The definition used in the Metaheuristics Network is the following. A metaheuristic is a set of concepts that can be used to define heuristic methods that can be applied to a wide set of different problems. In other words, a metaheuristic can be seen as a general algorithmic framework which can be applied to different optimization problems with relatively few modifications to make them adapted to a specific problem. Examples of metaheuristics include simulated annealing (SA), tabu search (TS), iterated local search (ILS), evolutionary algorithms (EC), and ant colony optimization (ACO). Although metaheuristics are widely used techniques, the how and why they work effectively for specific problems and for others not, is still not well understood. The overall goal of the Metaheuristics Network is to increase our understanding of metaheuristics, to propose new ways of structuring metaheuristic components, and to evaluate their contribution to metaheuristics behavior as well as to use the extracted information for the development of new hybrid metaheuristics.