Standard tabu search methods are based on the complete exploration of current solution neighborhood. However, for some problems due to the neighborhood size or to the fitness evaluation complexity, the total exploration of the neighborhood is impractical. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a local search method with no enumeration procedure. In other words, a single solution is examined at each iteration and retained for the future iterations. The idea is to randomly select one solution among a sub-set of the neighborhood of the current one. An adaptive exploration of neighborhood, using extension and restriction mechanisms represented by loop detection and tabu list structure, determines this sub-set. This approach is applied to the K-coloring problem and evaluated on standard benchmarks like DIMACS. The objective is to show how a generic method, without full neighborhood exploration, degradation control and problem-oriented operators, provides a very competitive results comparing to the best dedicated algorithms for graph coloring problems published in the literature.
Comparison of Simulated Annealing, Nearest Neighbour, and Tabu Search Methods to Solve Vehicle Routing Problems
