Initialization of metaheuristics: comprehensive review, critical analysis, and research directions

Abstract Initialization of metaheuristics is a crucial topic that lacks comprehensive and systematic review the state art. Providing such requires in‐depth study knowledge advances challenges in broader field metaheuristics, especially with regard to diversification strategies, order assess proposed methods provide insights for initialization. Motivated by aforementioned research gap, we related begin describing main metaheuristic their mechanisms. Then, analyze existing initialization approaches while proposing new categorization them. Next, focus on challenging optimization problems, namely constrained discrete optimization. Lastly, give local search approaches.