Automatic Parameter Tuning for Simulated Annealing based on Threading Technique and its Application to Traveling Salesman Problem

In order to solve the difficulties of parameter settings in SA algorithm, an improved practical SA algorithm is proposed by employing the threading techniques, appropriate software structures, and dynamic adjustments of temperature parameters. Threads provide a mechanism to realize a parallel processing under a disperse environment by controlling the flux of internal information of an application. Thread services divide a process by multiple processes leading to parallel processing of information to access common data. Therefore, efficient search is achieved by multiple search processes, different initial conditions, and automatic temperature adjustments. The proposed are methods are evaluated, for three types of Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) (random-tour, fractal-tour, and TSPLIB test data)are used for the performance evaluation. The experimental results show that the computational time is 5％ decreased comparing to conventional SA algorithm, furthermore there is no need for manual parameter settings. These results also demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable to real-world vehicle routing problems.