next up previous contents
Next: White cooling schedule Up: Simulated Annealing Previous: Simulated Annealing

The Annealing Schedules

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.





HPF demo web account
Mon Nov 18 19:45:42 EST 1996