Development of a parallel optimization method based on genetic simulated annealing algorithm

This paper presents a parallel genetic simulated annealing (PGSA) algorithm that has been developed and applied to optimize continuous problems. In PGSA, the entire population is divided into sub-populations, and in each sub-population the algorithm uses the local search ability of simulated annealing after crossover and mutation. The best individuals of each sub-population are migrated to neighboring ones after a certain number of epochs. An implementation of the algorithm is discussed and the performance is evaluated against a standard set of test functions. PGSA shows some remarkable improvement in comparison with the conventional parallel genetic algorithm and the breeder genetic algorithm (BGA).