The book Scatter Search by Manuel Laguna and Rafael Martà represents a long-awaited "missing link" in the literature of evolutionary methods. Scatter Search (SS)-together with its generalized form called Path Relinking-constitutes the only evolutionary approach that embraces a collection of principles from Tabu Search (TS), an approach popularly regarded to be divorced from evolutionary procedures. The TS perspective, which is responsible for introducing adaptive memory strategies into the metaheuristic literature (at purposeful level beyond simple inheritance mechanisms), may at first seem to be at odds with population-based approaches. Yet this perspective equips SS with a remarkably effective foundation for solving a wide range of practical problems. The successes documented by Scatter Search come not so much from the adoption of adaptive memory in the range of ways proposed in Tabu Search (except where, as often happens, SS is advantageously coupled with TS), but from the use of strategic ideas initially proposed for exploiting adaptive memory, which blend harmoniously with the structure of Scatter Search. From a historical perspective, the dedicated use of heuristic strategies both to guide the process of combining solutions and to enhance the quality of offspring has been heralded as a key innovation in evolutionary methods, giving rise to what are sometimes called "hybrid" (or "memetic") evolutionary procedures. The underlying processes have been introduced into the mainstream of evolutionary methods (such as genetic algorithms, for example) by a series of gradual steps beginning in the late 1980s.
- ISBN13 9781461350279
- Publish Date 30 October 2012
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
- Edition 2003 ed.
- Format Paperback
- Pages 291
- Language English