The Faculty Notebook, December 2003

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Learning Annealing Schedules for Channel Routing

The choice of a good annealing schedule is necessary for good performance of simulated annealing for channel routing and other combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new means of controlling annealing temperatures by posing the simulated annealing task as an optimal control problem and applying the techniques of reinforcement learning. Although many means of automating control of annealing temperatures have been proposed, this technique requires no specific knowledge of the problem and provides a natural means of expressing time versus quality trade-offs