A Tutorial on Tabu Search.pdfVIP

A TUTORIAL ON TABU SEARCH Alain Hertz1, Eric Taillard2, Dominique de Werra1 1 EPFL, Département de Mathématiques, MA-Ecublens, CH-1015 Lausanne 2 Université de Montréal, Centre de Recherche sur les Transports, Montréal, Canada H3C 3J7 Keywords: 1. Introduction Engineering and technology have been continuously providing examples of difficult optimization problems. In this talk we shall present the tabu search technique which with its various ingredients may be viewed as an engineer designed approach: no clean proof of convergence is known but the technique has shown a remarkable efficiency on many problems. The roots of tabu search go back to the 1970s; it was first presented in its present form by Glover [Glover, 1986]; the basic ideas have also been sketched by Hansen [Hansen 1986]. Additional efforts of formalization are reported in [Glover, 1989], [de Werra Hertz, 1989], [Glover, 1990]. Many computational experiments have shown that tabu search has now become an established optimization technique which can compete with almost all known techniques and which - by its flexibility - can beat many classical procedures. Up to now, there is no formal explanation of this good behavior. Recently, theoretical aspects of tabu search have been investigated [Faigle Kern, 1992], [Glover, 1992], [Fox, 1993]. A didactic presentation of tabu search and a series of applications have been collected in a recent book [Glover, Taillard, Laguna de Werra, 1992]. Its interest lies in the fact that success with tabu search implies often that a serious effort of modeling be done from the beginning. The applications in [Glover, Taillard, Laguna de Werra, 1992] provide many such examples together with a collection of references. A huge collection of optimization techniques have been suggested by a crowd of researchers of different fields; an infin