The book Scatter Search by Manuel Laguna and Rafael Mart! represents a
long-awaited "missing link" in the literature of evolutionary methods.
Scatter Search (SS)-together with its generalized form called Path
Relinking-constitutes the only evolutionary approach that embraces a
collection of principles from Tabu Search (TS), an approach popularly
regarded to be divorced from evolutionary procedures. The TS
perspective, which is responsible for introducing adaptive memory
strategies into the metaheuristic literature (at purposeful level beyond
simple inheritance mechanisms), may at first seem to be at odds with
population-based approaches. Yet this perspective equips SS with a
remarkably effective foundation for solving a wide range of practical
problems. The successes documented by Scatter Search come not so much
from the adoption of adaptive memory in the range of ways proposed in
Tabu Search (except where, as often happens, SS is advantageously
coupled with TS), but from the use of strategic ideas initially proposed
for exploiting adaptive memory, which blend harmoniously with the
structure of Scatter Search. From a historical perspective, the
dedicated use of heuristic strategies both to guide the process of
combining solutions and to enhance the quality of offspring has been
heralded as a key innovation in evolutionary methods, giving rise to
what are sometimes called "hybrid" (or "memetic") evolutionary
procedures. The underlying processes have been introduced into the
mainstream of evolutionary methods (such as genetic algorithms, for
example) by a series of gradual steps beginning in the late 1980s.
