Tabu Search: A Tutorial

Tabu search is a “higher level” heuristic procedure for solving optimization problems, designed to guide other methods (or their component processes) to escape the trap of local optimality. Tabu search has obtained optimal and near optimal solutions to a wide variety of classical and practical problems in applications ranging from scheduling to telecommunications and from character recognition to neural networks. It uses flexible structures memory (to permit search information to be exploited more thoroughly than by rigid memory systems or memoryless systems), conditions for strategically constraining and freeing the search process (embodied in tabu restrictions and aspiration criteria), and memory functions of varying time spans for intensifying and diversifying the search (reinforcing attributes historically found good and driving the search into new regions). Tabu search can be integrated with branch-and-bound and cutting plane procedures, and it has the ability to start with a simple implementation that can be upgraded over time to incorporate more advanced or specialized elements.