High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Reactive search optimization (RSO), like all local search techniques, is applied to the problem of finding the optimal configuration of a system; such configuration is usually composed of continuously or discretely varying parameters, while the optimality criterion is a numerical value associated to each configuration. In most cases, an optimization problem can be reduced to finding the (global) minimum of a function whose arguments are the configuration parameters, seen as free variables in the function's domain space.