Facts, Conjectures, and Improvements for Simulated Annealing (SIAM Monographs on Mathematical Modeling and Computation) (Monographs on Mathematical Modeling and Computation)

Simulated annealing has proved to be an easy and reliable method for finding optimal values of a problem in cases where there is no road map to possible solutions. Facts, Conjectures, and Improvements for Simulated Annealing offers an introduction to this topic for novices and provides an informative review of the area for the more expert reader. This book brings together for the first time many of the theoretical foundations for improvements to algorithms for global optimization that until now existed only in scattered research articles. The method described in this book operates by simulating the cooling of a (usually fictitious) physical system whose possible energies correspond to the values of the objective function being minimized. The analogy works because physical systems occupy only states with the lowest energy as the temperature is lowered to absolute zero.

Peter Salamon is Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University. He has held visiting positions at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the Theoretical Physics Institute in Heidelberg, and the Chemistry Institute at Tel Aviv University, among others. He has written over 100 refereed papers, one monograph, and four coedited volumes. His research interests include thermodynamics, optimization, and mathematical modeling.

Paolo Sibani is presently Chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Southern Denmark. He is a theoretical physicist who previously has worked at a number of research organizations such as Nordita and Bell Labs. He spent a sabbatical at San Diego State University in the academic year 1996-1997. He is a member of the Danish Physical Society and has authored or coauthored more than 50 research articles in statistical mechanics and computational physics. His current research interests include modeling the relaxation dynamics of glassy systems and biological macroevolution.

Richard Frost has over a decade of experience as a computational scientist in academic, government, military, and industrial settings. He is the owner of Frost Concepts in San Diego, which provides consulting and implementation services for the technical computing community along with professional training and educational services in mathematics and computer science. Richard has served in the past as Chair of the IEEE Computer Society San Diego chapter and as a panelist for the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research initiative.