What are some effective tabu search strategies for solving large-scale network optimization problems?
If you are working on a network optimization problem, such as designing a reliable communication network or minimizing the cost of transporting goods, you might encounter some challenges with finding the best solution. Network optimization problems are often complex, nonlinear, and have multiple objectives and constraints. Moreover, they can have large solution spaces, which means that searching for the optimal or near-optimal solution can be time-consuming and computationally expensive.
One way to tackle these challenges is to use a metaheuristic algorithm, such as tabu search. Tabu search is a local search method that explores the neighborhood of a current solution and moves to the best neighbor, even if it is worse than the current solution. This allows tabu search to escape from local optima and explore more diverse regions of the solution space. However, tabu search also keeps track of the solutions that have been visited and marks them as tabu, which means that they cannot be revisited for a certain number of iterations. This prevents tabu search from cycling back to the same solutions and helps it converge to a global optimum.
In this article, we will discuss some effective tabu search strategies for solving large-scale network optimization problems. We will cover the following topics: