A survey of simulated annealing applications to operations research problems

This paper surveys the application of simulated annealing (SA) to operations research (OR) problems. It is concluded that SA has been applied to both traditional (like single machine, flowshop and jobshop scheduling, lot sizing, traveling salesman problems) and non-traditional (like graph coloring, number partitioning) OR areas. It is also concluded that SA is quite appropriate when the alternative solution method is based on enumeration. SA usually requires more computational resources in exchange for not being trapped in local optima.