Disadvantages of Simulated Annealing

• Repeatedly annealing with a schedule is very slow, especially if the cost function is expensive to compute

• For problems where the energy landscape is smooth, or there are few local minima, SA is overkill --- simpler, faster methods (e.g., gradient descent) will work better. But usually don't know what the energy landscape is.

• Heuristic methods, which are problem-specific or take advantage of extra information about the system, will often be better than general methods. But SA is often comparable to heuristics.

• The method cannot tell whether it has found an optimal solution. Some other method (e.g. branch and bound) is required to do this.