Abstract

This paper explores the use of simulated annealing for solving arbitrary combinatorial optimisation problems. It reviews an existing code called GPSIMAN for solving 0-1 problems, and evaluates it against a commercial branch-and-bound code, OSL. The problems tested include travelling salesman, graph colouring, bin packing, quadratic assignment and generalised assignment. The paper then describes a technique for representing these problems using arbitrary integer variables, and shows how a general simulated annealing algorithm can also be applied. This new code, INTSA, out performs GPSIMAN and OSL on almost all of the problems tested.