Variable neighborhood search
The variable neighborhood search strategy involves the iterative exploration of larger and larger neighborhoods for a given local optima until an improvement is located, after which the search in these neighborhoods is repeated. The strategy is motivated by three principles: 1) a local minimum for one neighborhood structure may not be a local minimum for a different neighborhood structure, 2) a global minimum is a local minimum for all possible neighborhood structures, and 3) the local minima are relatively close to the global minima for many classes of problems.
