The Life Span Method { A New Variant of Local Search {

In this paper, we present a variant of local search, namely the Life Span Method (LSM), for generic combinatorial optimization problems. The LSM can be seen as a variation of tabu search introduced by Glover [18, 19]. We outline applications of the LSM to several combinatorial optimization problems such as the maximum stable set problem, the traveling salesman problem, the quadratic assignment problem, the graph partitioning problem, the graph coloring problem, and the job-shop scheduling problem.