It is a long time that the Simulated Annealing (SA) procedure is introduced as a model-free optimization for solving NP-hard problems. Improvements from the standard SA in the recent decade mostly concentrate on combining its original algorithm with some heuristic methods. These modifications are rarely happened to the initial condition selection methods from which the annealing schedules start...

It is a long time that the Simulated Annealing (SA) procedure is introduced as a model-free optimization for solving NP-hard problems. Improvements from the standard SA in the recent decade mostly concentrate on combining its original algorithm with some heuristic methods. These modifications are rarely happened to the initial condition selection methods from which the annealing schedules start...

introduction: we aimed to compare apical canal transportation of extracted teeth and two types of simulated resin blocks. materials and methods: mesiobuccal root of extracted maxillary molars, high hardness simulated resin blocks (knoop hardness=40) and low hardness simulated resin blocks (knoop hardness=22) were prepared with k-files using step-back technique (n=15 canals in each group). doubl...

Metaheuristics are general problem solving algorithms which abstract from the actual problem description. Therefore they can be easily applied to many optimization problems. Simulated annealing is a simple and fast metaheuristic with an analogy to metal processing. As metal particles generate a solid and regular structure when cooling slowing simulated annealing seeks a low-energy solution avoi...