The most popular and widely used cooling schedule is the
geometric cooling. It computes the new temperature () of
the SA algorithm as follows: Let
(
) denotes
the cooling factor, then
Typically the value of is chosen from the range of
.
This schedule has three main advantages: it is based on a sound
theoretical foundation, is well understood by all researchers working
on annealing, and is the most widely used cooling schedule. Because of
these advantages it is used as a base line for comparison with other
scheduling schemes. Of course, there are other non-adaptive (or
geometric) type schedules as well as the adaptive ones as we outline
few below. The greatest difference between these schedules are in the
temperature decrements and time spent at each temperature. From
experimentations and other sources, we would like to state that
neither the temperature changes, nor the time spent at a given
temperature, taken alone, are of any significant; all that
is important is their combination.