Cooling Schedules For Simulated Annealing Based Scheduling Algorithms

Publication
Abramson, D.A. , Dang, H. and Krisnamoorthy, M., (1994), Cooling Schedules for Simulated Annealing Based Scheduling Algorithms, Proceeding of the 17th Australian Computer Science Conference, pp 541 - 550. Univ of Caterbury, Christchurch, NZ, Jan 1994
Abstract
This paper describes the use of simulated annealing for solving combinatorial optimaisation problems and then compares 5 different cooling schedules. These are the most commonly used scheme, the geometric cooling schedule, a scheme which uses two cooling rates in combination with a method for detecting when a phase transition occurrs, plus three schemes which allow reheating as well as cooling. The reheating scheme are variants of the geometric cooling schedule plus one which computes a temperature to use as the reheating point. In summary the third reheating scheme produces better quality solutions in less time than the others. The schemes are evaluated using a complex scheduling problem found in timetable computation.
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coolsched_anneal.pdf