Flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is one of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems known to be NP-hard. This paper proposes a novel hybrid imperialist competitive algorithm with simulated annealing (HICASA) for solving the FJSP. HICASA explores the search space by using imperial competitive algorithm (ICA) and use a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm for exploitation in the s...

It is a long time that the Simulated Annealing (SA) procedure has been introduced as a model-free optimization for solving NP-hard problems. Improvements from the standard SA in the recent decade mostly concentrate on combining its original algorithm with some heuristic methods. These modifications are rarely happened to the initial condition selection methods from which the annealing schedules...

The Network Design Problem (NDP) is one of the important problems in combinatorial optimization. Among the network design problems, the Multicommodity Capacitated Network Design (MCND) problem has numerous applications in transportation, logistics, telecommunication, and production systems. The MCND problems with splittable flow variables are NP-hard, which means they require exponential time t...

We present a deterministic annealing variant of the EM algorithm for maximum likelihood parameter estimation problems. In our approach, the EM process is reformulated as the problem of minimizing the thermodynamic free energy by using the principle of maximum entropy and statistical mechanics analogy. Unlike simulated annealing approaches, this minimization is deterministically performed. Moreo...

Usually lifeline systems, such as water distribution network and gas supply network, cover large areas. For these systems, network topology design based on seismic reliability provides a good way to design new systems and update old ones. In this paper, a topology optimization model for lifeline networks is established. The aim of the model is to find the least-cost network topology while its s...

As for the limitations of algorithms in global path planning of mobile robot at present, this study applies the improved simulated annealing algorithm artificial neural networks to path planning of mobile robot in order to better the weaknesses of great scale of iteration computation and slow convergence, since the best-reserved simulated annealing algorithm was introduced and it was effectivel...

Bus network design is an important problem in public transportation. A main step to this design is determining the number of required terminals and their locations. This is a special type of facility location problem, which is a time-consuming, large scale, combinatorial problem. In a previous attempt by the authors, this problem had been solved by GAMS, based on a branch and bound algorithm. ...

This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm for the graph coloring problem based on a combination of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. Our algorithm exploits a novel crossover operator for graph coloring. Moreover, we investigate various ways in which simulated annealing can be used to enhance the performance of an evolutionary algorithm. Experiments performed on various collections...

In the paper the programmable logic array (PLA) topological optimization problem is dealt with using folding techniques. A PLA folding algorithm based on the method of simulated annealing is presented. A simulated-annealing PLA folding algorithm is presented for multiple unconstrained folding. Then, the algorithm is extended to handle constrained folding. In this way, simple folding is consider...