A General Purpose Distributed Implementation of Simulated Annealing

In this paper, we present a problem independent general purpose parallel implementation of simulated annealing on distributed message-passing multiprocessor systems. The sequential algorithm is studied and we give a classification of combinatorial optimization problems together with their neighborhood structures. Several parallelization approaches are examined considering their suitability for problems of the various classes. For typical representatives of the different classes good parallel simulated annealing implementations are presented. A new parallel SA-algorithm is presented, that works simultaneously on several markov chains and decreases the number of chains dynamically. With a parallel self-adapting cooling schedule this method yields good results. All algorithms are implemented in OCCAM-2 on a free configurable transputer system. Measurements on various numbers of processors up to 128 transputers are presented. 1 Introduction Simulated annealing (SA) was first presented by..