Copyright A. Filippone (1994-2005). All Rights Reserved.

Simulated Annealing

Summary

  • Overview
  • Internal Energy of a System
  • Physics of Annealing
  • Annealing and Numerical Optimization
  • Objective Functions


The starting point is an analogy with the thermodynamics of equilibrium. Condensed matter consists of a very large number of molecules, whose energy is described by the Boltzmann probability distribution: P(E) = exp(-E/kT), where E is the energy of the configuration, T the temperature and k the Boltzmann constant (Kirkpatrick-Gelatt-Vecchi, 1983). Full document available on CD-ROM.

Copyright A. Filippone (1994-2005). All Rights Reserved.