A survey on optimization metaheuristics

Metaheuristics are widely recognized as efficient approaches for many hard optimization problems. This paper provides a survey of some of the main metaheuristics. It outlines the components and concepts that are used in various metaheuristics in order to analyze their similarities and differences. The classification adopted in this paper differentiates between single solution based metaheuristics and population based metaheuristics. The literature survey is accompanied by the presentation of references for further details, including applications. Recent trends are also briefly discussed.