A Fast Method for Generalized Starting Temperature Determination in Monotonically Cooling Two-Stage Simulated Annealing Systems (supercedes CS-93-52).

We propose a method for determining the starting temperature in two-stage simulated annealing systems utilizing traditional monotonically cooling temperature schedules. While most previous work in this area has focused on ad hoc experimentally-derived constant starting temperatures for the low temperature annealing phase, this paper presents a more formal method for generalized starting temperature determination for the aforementioned class of two-stage simulated annealing systems. We have tested our method on three NP-hard optimization problems using both classic and adaptive cooling schedules. The experimental results have been consistently very good-on average the running time is halved when using an adaptive cooling schedule and reduced by a third in the case of the classic schedule-with no average loss in solution quality.
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Varanelli, JM, and JP Cohoon. "A Fast Method for Generalized Starting Temperature Determination in Monotonically Cooling Two-Stage Simulated Annealing Systems (supercedes CS-93-52).." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (1995).