Tabu Search Algorithm

Tabu search is a metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization that explores the search space by moving at each step to the best available neighboring solution, even one worse than the current solution, while maintaining a short-term memory called a tabu list that forbids revisiting recently examined moves or solutions for a number of iterations, preventing the search from cycling back to solutions it has already left and encouraging it to explore new regions of the search space. Fred Glover introduced the technique in 1986. It has been applied widely to scheduling, routing and other combinatorial problems where simple local search methods tend to get stuck in local optima.