Meta-heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms for Engineering Optimization

6 Tabu Search

Summary

This chapter describes the tabu search (TS), which is a meta‐heuristic algorithm for combinatorial optimization. A brief literature review of development and applications of the TS opens this chapter. The foundations of the TS and its algorithmic steps are described next, followed by a pseudocode of the TS.

6.1 Introduction

The tabu search (TS) was developed by Glover (1986). It is designed to solve combinatorial (finite solution set) optimization problems. Simple TS and advanced TS were introduced by Glover (1989, 1990). Bland (1995) implemented the TS in a structural design context and showed that the TS is a technically viable technique for optimal structural design. Fanni et al. (1999) applied the TS coupled with deterministic strategies for the optimal design of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. Wang et al. (1999) demonstrated the capability of the TS to optimal design of multiproduct batch chemical processes. Nara et al. (2001) applied the TS to determine locations and discrete capacities of distributed generators so that the distribution loss is minimized. Hajji et al. (2004) developed a new TS algorithm for global optimization of multimodal functions with continuous domain. Misevicius (2005) implemented the TS to solve the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Nourzad and Afshar (2009) proposed a probabilistic improvement to the neighborhood selection of the TS and used that to find optimal water resources allocation for an industrial ...