Rayleigh wave inversion using heat-bath simulated annealing algorithm

The dispersion of Rayleigh waves can be used to obtain near-surface shear (S)-wave velocity profiles. This is performed mainly by inversion of the phase velocity dispersion curves, which has been proven to be a highly nonlinear and multimodal problem, and it is unsuitable to use local search methods (LSMs) as the inversion algorithm. In this study, a new strategy is proposed based on a variant of simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. SA, which simulates the annealing procedure of crystalline solids in nature, is one of the global search methods (GSMs). There are many variants of SA, most of which contain two steps: the perturbation of model and the Metropolis-criterion-based acceptance of the new model. In this paper we propose a one-step SA variant known as heat-bath SA. To test the performance of the heat-bath SA, two models are created. Both noise-free and noisy synthetic data are generated. Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm and a variant of SA, known as the fast simulated annealing (FSA) algorithm, are also adopted for comparison. The inverted results of the synthetic data show that the heat-bath SA algorithm is a reasonable choice for Rayleigh wave dispersion curve inversion. Finally, a real-world inversion example from a coal mine in northwestern China is shown, which proves that the scheme we propose is applicable.