Machine Learning-Enhanced Tabu Search for Tactical Wireless Network Design
Designing high-performance tactical wireless networks under realistic operational constraints gives rise to challenging combinatorial optimization problems, where the evaluation of candidate solutions relies on detailed physical and traffic-aware models. Although classical metaheuristics such as Tabu Search offer effective mechanisms for exploring large search spaces, their computational cost remains high because numerous candidate moves must be evaluated at every iteration. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework that improves the efficiency of Tabu Search by learning to guide its move selection process. Rather than altering the neighborhood structure, our approach exploits the information contained in the search trajectories generated during the optimization process. At each iteration, we record both improving and non-improving edge-based transformations together with a set of descriptive features capturing the structural, geometric, and performance characteristics of the network. This information is used to train a Graph Neural Network (GNN) that predicts the impact of candidate moves on the objective function. The trained model is then integrated into the Tabu Search algorithm to rank candidate transformations according to their predicted quality, thereby reducing the number of costly objective evaluations while maintaining an effective exploration of the search space. Experimental results on synthetic benchmark instances demonstrate that the proposed learning-assisted Tabu Search notably reduces computation time while consistently producing higher-quality solutions than the standard algorithm. These findings highlight the potential of combining machine learning with metaheuristics by leveraging the implicit knowledge embedded in search trajectories, paving the way for more efficient solution methods for large-scale network design problems.