On the sensitivity of reactive tabu search to its meta-parameters

In this paper, we assess the sensitivity of reactive tabu search to its meta-parameters. With a thorough experimental analysis, based on the quadratic assignment and the maximum clique problem, we show that the performance of reactive tabu search is relatively insensitive to its meta-parameters. This is particularly evident when compared to the sensitivity of tabu search to its parameters: tabu search is rather penalized if used with sub-optimal parameter settings. Reactive tabu search does not strongly pay its high parameter robustness in terms of performance, although it does not improve the peak performance of tabu search.