Three Parallel Algorithms for Simulated Annealing.

A vehicle routing problem which reduces to an NP-complete set-partitioning problem is considered. Three parallel algorithms for simulated annealing, i.e. the independent, semi-independent and co-operating 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 proximity to the optimum solution. The empirical evidence supported by the statistical analysis indicate that co-operation of processes in parallel simulated annealing yields more accurate solutions to the vehicle routing problem as compared to the case when the processes run independently or semi-independently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]