Metaheuristics: From Design to Implementation (Wiley Series on Parallel and Distributed... at Dominant Systems Book Store

"It will be an indispensable text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, operations research, applied mathematics, control, business and management and engineering." (Zentralblatt MATH, 2010)

Customer Reviews & Comments
The book is a good and detailed description of what metaheuristics involves. This is applied to solving hard computational problems. There are summaries of many methods developed over the last 50 years. The simplex method. Metropolis Monte Carlo. Simulated annealing. Genetic algorithms. And others. There is deliberately not enough information about most of these for you to use them given only the book as a starting point. Space considerations. But mostly the book explains at a higher level, how methods can be understood. Some are for exploiting; ie. intensively looking in a given region of the objective space around a starting point. Simulated annealing is a good example of such a method. Other methods are for exploring. A broader search in the objective or solution space. Genetic algorithms, with their mutations and crossover recombinations are very strong here, using ideas borrowed from biological evolution. More importantly, the book shows how many hard problems have to be tackled by a combination of exploring and exploiting. The combining of algorithms is what gives metaheuristics its name. One caveat is that even at a summary level, the description of tabu search was a bit unclear, compared to the excellent synopses of simulated annealing and genetic algorithms.

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