Tabu search - a guided tour

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the ideas behind Tabu Search - one of the most popular metaheuristic appoaches. For the sake of concreteness a simple example of the traveling salesman problem will be used in the discussion to illustrate the process of designing a Tabu Search algorithm. In addition, some extensions will be presented. Finally, applications will also be provided as well as references to more specialized publications.