What is Preference Structure

Simulated annealing is a probabilistic local search method for global combinatorial optimisation problems allowing gradual convergence to a near-optimal solution. It consists of a sequence of moves from a current solution to a better one according to certain transition rules while accepting occasionally some uphill solutions in order to guarantee diversity in the domain exploration and to avoid getting caught at local optima. The process is managed by a certain static or dynamic cooling schedule that controls the number of iterations. This meta-heuristic provides several advantages that include the ability of escaping local optima and the use of small amount of short-term memory. A wide range of applications and variants have hitherto emerged as a consequence of its adaptability to many combinatorial as well as continuous optimisation cases, and also its guaranteed asymptotic convergence to the global optimum.