Large Neighborhood Search

Abstract

Heuristics based on large neighborhood search have recently shown outstanding results in solving various transportation and scheduling problems. Large neighborhood search methods explore a complex neighborhood by use of heuristics. Using large neighborhoods makes it possible to find better candidate solutions in each iteration and hence traverse a more promising search path. Starting from the large neighborhood search method, we give an overview of very large scale neighborhood search methods and discuss recent variants and extensions like variable depth search and adaptive large neighborhood search.