Search space smoothing and related heuristic optimization algorithms provide an alternative approach to simulated annealing and its variants: while simulated annealing traverses barriers in the energy landscape at finite temperatures, search space smoothing intends to remove these barriers, so...

Simulated annealing is the classic physical optimization algorithm, which has been applied to a large variety of problems for many years. Over time, several adaptive mechanisms for decreasing the temperature and thus controlling the acceptance of deteriorations have been developed, based on the...