Optimization Algorithms (survey and analysis)

Nowadays an increasing number of papers appears in the subject of combinatorial optimization proposing a great variety of heuristics and metaheuristics, most of them apply special solution to fit the particular problem type. The analysis points out the importance of the generalization but the special intelligence in the algorithm design is still very important. Although the navigation in the solution space can be realized implicitly it has a decisive role in the performance. It is important to note that the success of sophisticated methods is often reduced by their relatively bad explorative capability. The well known algorithms are compared and also the latest most successful methods - based on fast and simple heuristics- are discussed.