| Article ID: | iaor1999330 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 92 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 493 |
| End Page Number: | 511 |
| Publication Date: | Aug 1996 |
| Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
| Authors: | Pirlot Marc |
| Keywords: | combinatorial analysis, statistics: data envelopment analysis |
This paper is a tutorial introduction to three recent yet widely used general heuristics: Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, and Genetic Algorithms. A relatively precise description and an example of application are provided for each of the methods, as well as a tentative evaluation and comparison from a pragmatic point of view.