SIMANN: A Global Optimization Algorithm using Simulated Annealing

This paper describes SIMANN, a Fortran and GAUSS implementation of the simulated annealing algorithm. The Fortran code was used in "Global Optimization of Statistical Functions with Simulated Annealing" (Goffe, Ferrier, and Rogers 1994). In that paper, simulated annealing was found to be competitive, if not superior, to multiple restarts of conventional optimization routines for difficult optimization problems. This paper compares SIMANN to the DFP algorithm on another optimization problem, namely, the maximum likelihood estimation of a rational expectations model, which was previously studied in the literature. SIMANN again performs quite well, and shows several advantages over DFP. This paper also describes simulated annealing, and gives explicit directions and an example for using the included GAUSS and Fortran code.