A comparison of stochastic local search and population based search

For discrete optimization, the two basic search principles prevailing are stochastic local search and population based search. Local search has difficulties to get out of local optima. Here variable neighborhood search outperforms stochastic local search methods which accept worse points with a certain probability. Population based search performs best on problems with sharp gaps. It is outperformed by stochastic local search only when there are many paths to good local optima.