0 If you do a global search on a computer, you look for every example of a word or phrase in a document:
Then more than a dozen software packages for complete global search are described.
It is therefore evident that a global search of the entire solution space has a tendency to be computationally intractable.
This same example is estimated to require over 20,000 years to solve by a global search on a similar machine.
The basic idea of global search is to represent and manipulate sets of candidate solutions or solution spaces.
In the rest of the paper we illustrate the process of deriving a global search algorithm by applying it to an example.
The efficiency of global search methods enables us to keep only small solution fragments, which leads to a larger neighbourhood leaving more room for improvement.
The population-based genetic algorithm can be regarded as a global search algorithm whereas representative-agent-type search algorithms are necessarily local.
The procedure has shown to be competitive compared to both the pure global search procedure and simple local search methods based on simpler neighbourhoods.
