Tabu search not an optimal choice for models of agricultural systems

Abstract

With the increasing use of models to evaluate agricultural systems and identify the best solutions, the difficult task of economic optimisation can be performed by a number of different methods. Amongst these is the newer tabu search strategy, which initially appears well suited to this task. However, despite successes in other disciplines, it has methodological flaws when applied to multi-dimensional systems with continuous independent variables, as demonstrated in this paper. For these types of problems, typical of agricultural models, other methods such as simulated annealing or genetic algorithms appear better suited.