Please cite this article as: J. Borges, M.S. Rodrigues, C. Lopes, D. Costa, F.M. Couto, T. Kubart, B. Martins, N. Duarte, J.P. Dias, A. Cavaleiro, T. Polcar, F. Macedo, F. Vaz, Thin films composed of Ag nanoclusters dispersed in TiO2: influence of composition and thermal annealing on the microstructure and physical responses, Applied Surface Science (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apsusc.20...

Artificial intelligence methods and search techniques such as simulated annealing and simultaneous perturbation can be used in simulation optimization of complex stochastic systems. Simultaneous perturbation has also been applied in the area of neural networks. Simulation optimization methods are often used when it is difficult to obtain the closed form of the objective function, but it is poss...

Since the logistics is an industry with relatively higher energy consumption, the building industry lowcarbon logistics ought to attract wide attentions from the building enterprises. Simulated annealing is an effective intelligent algorithm for optimizing the building materials logistics route. This paper analyzes the similarities between the process of the building materials logistics route o...

A sizable part of the theoretical literature on simulated annealing deals with a property called convergence, which asserts that the simulated annealing chain is in the set of global minimum states of the objective function with probability tending to 1. However, in practice, the convergent algorithms are considered too slow, whereas a number of nonconvergent ones are usually preferred. We atte...

We consider a single-machine two-agent problem where the objective is to minimize a weighted combination of the total completion time and the total tardiness of jobs from the first agent given that no tardy jobs are allowed for the second agent. A branch-and-bound algorithm is developed to derive the optimal sequence and two simulated annealing heuristic algorithms are proposed to search for th...

A delivery problem which reduces to an NP-complete set-partitioning problem is considered. Two algorithms of parallel simulated annealing, i.e. the simultaneous independent searches and the simultaneous periodically interacting searches are investigated. The objective is to improve the accuracy of solutions to the problem by applying parallelism. The accuracy of a solution is meant as its proxi...

Simulated annealing’s high computational intensity has stimulated researchers to experiment with various parallel and distributed simulated annealing algorithms for shared memory, message-passing, and hybrid-parallel platforms. MapReduce is an emerging distributed computing framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity servers; to our knowledge, MapReduce has not been used ...

introduction several methods have been developed to aid in selecting a network of biodiversity protected areas. one of these methods is artificial intelligence which includes a number of different computer algorithms that use an objective function to find the best solution. an algorithm is a mathematical process or a set of rules used for problem solving. recently, site selection algorithms hav...

abstract: in this paper, an exergy analysis approach is proposed for optimal design of distillation column by using simulated annealing algorithm. first, the simulation of a distillation column was performed by using the shortcut results and irreversibility in each tray was obtained. the area beneath the exergy loss profile was used as irreversibility index in the whole column. then, first opti...