A Concurrent Implementation of Simulated Annealing and Its Application to the VRPTW Optimization Problem

Abstract

It is known, that concurrent computing can be applied to heuristicmethods (e.g. simulated annealing) for combinatorial optimizationto shorten time of computation. This paper presents a communicationscheme for message passing environment, tested on the known optimizationproblem - VRPTW. Application of the scheme allows speed-up withoutworsening quality of solutions - for one of Solomon's benchmarkingtests the new best solution was found.