An overview of physical annealing and simulated annealing methods is presented. The target audience includes computational analysts and software engineers who are considering simulated annealing for the solution of a combinatorical optimization problem. Several important implementation issues are discussed including decompositions for parallel programming. Special emphasis is given to the often...

This paper studies quantum annealing (QA) for clustering, which can be seen as an extension of simulated annealing (SA). We derive a QA algorithm for clustering and propose an annealing schedule, which is crucial in practice. Experiments show the proposed QA algorithm finds better clustering assignments than SA. Furthermore, QA is as easy as SA to implement.

This article introduces a new variant on the popular optimization method, simulated annealing, herein called modified discrete-state simulated annealing. A guide in practical implementation of simulated tempering is also provided. The algorithms are tested in the design of an ideal collector for a travelling wave tube amplifier. keywords: simulated annealing, simulated tempering, travelling wav...

Nanocrystals embedded in an oxide matrix have been fabricated by annealing SiGeO films deposited by LPCVD. The composition of the oxide layers and its evolution after annealing as well as the presence and nature of nanocrystals in the films have been studied by several experimental techniques. The results are analyzed and discussed in terms of the main deposition parameters and the annealing te...

This paper presents studies on a deterministic annealing algorithm based on quantum annealing for variational Bayes (QAVB) inference, which can be seen as an extension of the simulated annealing for variational Bayes (SAVB) inference. QAVB is as easy as SAVB to implement. Experiments revealed QAVB finds a better local optimum than SAVB in terms of the variational free energy in latent Dirichlet...

Quantum annealing is a generic algorithm using quantum-mechanical fluctuations to search for the solution of an optimization problem. The present paper first reviews the fundamentals of quantum annealing and then reports on preliminary results for an alternative method. The review part includes the relationship of quantum annealing with classical simulated annealing. We next propose a novel qua...

We report the characterization of aluminum oxide (Al2O3) films which are grown on Si substrates by electron beam evaporator. This paper focuses on the characteristic variation of Al2O3 films depending on the different annealing techniques, such as post-deposition annealing and post-metallization annealing. The capacitance-voltage (C-V) curves indicate a negative charge and interface trap charge...

This paper describes a variant of simulated annealing incorporating a variable penalty method to solve the traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW). Augmenting temperature from traditional simulated annealing with the concept of pressure (analogous to the value of the penalty multiplier), compressed annealing integrates a penalty method with heuristic search to address the TSPTW. Co...

An algorithm of simulated annealing for the job shop scheduling problem is presented. The proposed algorithm restarts with a new value every time the previous algorithm finishes. To begin the process of annealing, the starting point is a randomly generated schedule with the condition that the initial value of the makespan of the schedule does not surpass a previously established upper bound. Th...

Mutations in HepA-related protein (HARP, or SMARCAL1) cause Schimke immunoosseous dysplasia (SIOD). HARP has ATP-dependent annealing helicase activity, which helps to stabilize stalled replication forks and facilitate DNA repair during replication. Here, we show that the conserved tandem HARP (2HP) domain dictates this annealing helicase activity. Furthermore, chimeric proteins generated by fus...