An Incremental Evolutionary Approach to Tabu Search

General Idea

The basic idea of our approach (framework) is inspired by the viral transmission incidents observed between swine (pig) and avian (bird) flues several years ago. These incidents showed that while influenza A virus (bird flu) in its original form can hardly infect human beings, it can transform itself into a new form which can pose threats to humans if it goes through pigs. In other words, while moving directly from birds to humans is an infeasible path for the flu, moving indirectly from birds to humans through pigs is a feasible path (see Figure 1). This means that, although a virus residing in one environment (E₁) cannot move to a very different environment (E_M) directly, it may be able to eventually transform itself into a new form that can reside in E_M if, for example, it goes through an indirect transmission path: E₁ → E₂ → ... → E_m → E_m+1 → … → E_M, where E_m and E_m+1 represent different, but similar, living environments (hosts populations) for the virus. Our approach is based on this idea of sequential (and gradual) viral transmission and evolution.

Figure 1.

Viral transmission paths