Strategies with memories: Local search in an application oriented environment

The idea of this extended foreword to the special issue on applied local search is threefold. Firstly, the authors provide a brief and fundamental description of what is nowadays called local search. Components which have meanwhile become an integral part of the classical aspects on simulated annealing, tabu search and genetic algorithms are reviewed. Furthermore, today tabu search can be considered as the major pillar of local search. Hence, attention is drawn to a couple of tabu search issues more recently developed such as the reverse elimination method and ejection chains. Secondly, local search based knowledge engineering is developed to constitute a substantial part of knowledge based information systems. Within this general setting local search will be considered as one particular paradigm of machine learning. Thirdly, the authors are going to introduce what is considered to be the main subject of this issue, local search applications. They briefly embed the contents of the subsequent papers and group them with respect to their particular methods and models within the above mentioned framework.