  This paper presents an investigation of two search techniques, tabu search
(TS) and simulated annealing (SA), to assess their relative merits when applied
to engineering design optimisation. Design optimisation problems are generally
characterised as having multi-modal search spaces and discontinuities making
global optimisation techniques beneficial. Both techniques claim to be capable
of locating globally optimum solutions on a range of problems but this
capability is derived from different underlying philosophies. While tabu search
uses a semi-deterministic approach to escape local optima, simulated annealing
uses a complete stochastic approach. The performance of each technique is
investigated using a structural optimisation problem. These performances are
then compared to each other as and to a steepest descent (SD) method.
