TABU SEARCH NOT AN OPTIMAL CHOICE FOR MODELS OF AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

With the increasing use of models to evaluate agricultural systems and identify the best solutions, the difficult task of economic optimisat ion can be performed by a number of different methods. Amongst these i s 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 co ntinuous independent variables, as demonstrated in this paper. I;or th ese types of problems, typical of agricultural models, other methods s uch as simulated annealing or genetic algorithms appear better suited. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved.