Investigation of acceptance simulated annealing — A simplified approach to adaptive cooling schedules

Simulated annealing is the classic physical optimization algorithm, which has been applied to a large variety of problems for many years. Over time, several adaptive mechanisms for decreasing the temperature and thus controlling the acceptance of deteriorations have been developed, based on the measurement of the mean value and the variance of the energy. Here we propose a new simplified approach in which we consider the probability of accepting deteriorations as the main control parameter and derive the temperature by averaging over the last few deteriorations stored in a memory. We present results for the traveling salesman problem and demonstrate, how the amount of data retained influences both the cooling schedule and the quality of the results.