SIMULATED ANNEALING APPLIED TO THE PROCESS ALLOCATION PROBLEM

Simulated annealing is a stochastic optimization method based on iterative improvement with 'controlled' deteriorations of the objective function in order to escape local minima. The heuristic is based on an analogy between problems in combinatorial optimization and statistical mechanics. This paper presents an application of the simulated annealing method to the process allocation problem which consists of allocating a number of communicating processes to a network of processors. Computational results of a set of random problems which have similar characteristics to a real world telecommunications problem are also presented.