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The major strengths of simulated Tabu search had the advantage of not
annealing, [Ref. 35] are that it can using hill-climbing strategies. Its
optimize functions with arbitrary degrees performance could also be enhanced by
on non-linearity, stochasticity, boundary branch and bound techniques. However,
conditions and constraints. It is also the mathematics behind this technique
statistically guaranteed of finding an was not as strong as those behind neural
optimal solution. However, it has its networks or simulated annealing.
disadvantages too. Like GAs it is very Furthermore, a solution space would
slow, its efficiency is dependent on the have to be generated. Hence, tabu search
nature of the surface it is trying to would require a knowledge of the entire
optimize and must be adapted to specific operation at a more detailed level. Battiti
problems. The availability of and Tecchiolli [Ref. 22] had compared
supercomputing resources, however, Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search
mitigates these drawbacks and makes on the Quadratic assignment problem.
simulated annealing a good candidate. They found that tabu search does require
extra overhead in terms of memory
Neural networks have the advantage that usage and adaptation mechanisms
the entire operations process can be compared to Simulated Annealing.
treated as a black box. This would ease However, it avoids the "traps" inherent
the burden of having to model the entire in simulated annealing such as attraction
system. It has, however, the basins and hence did work better in their
disadvantage of requiring us to gather case. Paulli J., [Ref 23] reports, on the
data and training the network. other hand, that simulated annealing is
Furthermore, the performance of the significantly better than tabu search. He
optimizer would be heavily dependent cites the excessive memory overhead as
on the quality of the data used. well as the time required by tabu search
to form a search trajectory as being the
Genetic algorithms perhaps seem to be main causes of the poor performance.
the most popular algorithms at present.
Their advantage lies in the ease of Stochastic Approximation did not have
coding them and their inherent as many applications reported as the
parallelism. The use of genotypes other techniques. This could have been
instead of phenotypes to travel in the because of various factors such as the
search space makes them less likely to lack of a metaphorical concept to
get stuck in local minima. They have, facilitate understanding and proofs that
however, certain drawbacks to them. are complex. It has recently shown great
GAs require very intensive computation promise, however, especially in
and hence are slow. They are also not optimizing non-discrete problems. The
guaranteed to give an optimal solution. stochastic nature of our model along
There are examples to show that simple with the complexity of the application
domain makes this an attractive version is most desirable. The
candidate. implementation must in no way
compromise the security of the
Mixed integer programming was found underlying hardware and software
to have the widest application. It was systems.
preferred to routing airline crews and
other similar problems that bore a close While the authors appreciated the
resemblance to the problem we had at strengths of each technique, Stochastic
hand. Furthermore, the mathematical Approximation and Simulated
rigor we were looking for was well Annealing best fit our application. We
established. However, as the nature of chose simulated annealing due in part to
our problem is continuous and dynamic the fact that it lent itself naturally to
we preferred to use either Simulated optimizing a scenario-based simulation
Annealing or Stochastic Approximation. [Ref 20]. Another reason that influenced
our choice included the fact that the
5. Summary and Conclusions mathematics behind Simulated
Annealing is based on the rigorous
This paper has surveyed a wide range of theory of Markov chains. Additionally,
applications to determine which several convergence proofs have existed
optimization technique has proven to be for it in technical literature for quite a
most successful. This knowledge will be few years. Finally, Simulated Annealing
applied in choosing one of these variants such as Adaptive Simulated
techniques to optimize a simulation Annealing and Quenching provide a
model of the operations of the Air Force. quick first pass solution. More
The paper has briefly enumerated the elaborate simulated annealing techniques
strengths and weaknesses of each such as enhanced simulated annealing
technique and elaborated in some detail [Ref. 36] provide a clean mechanism
the techniques themselves. with parallelism inherent in it to achieve
speed up.
Due to the very nature of the application,
the optimization methodology would
have to meet certain requirements. It 6. References
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