Neighborhood Search Algorithms for the Maximal Covering Problem

Various techniques have been applied to solve the maximal covering problem. Tabu search is also one of them. But, existing researches were lacking of the synthetic analysis and the effort for performance improvement about neighborhood search techniques such as hill-climbing search and simulated annealing including tabu search. In this paper, I introduce the way to improve performance of neighborhood search techniques through various experiments and analyses. Basically, all neighborhood search algorithms use the k-exchange neighborhood generation method. And I analyzed how the performance of each algorithm changes according to various parameter settings. Experimental results have shown that simple hill-climbing search and simulated annealing can produce better results than any other techniques. And I confirmed that simple hill-climbing search can produce similar results as simulated annealing unlike general case.