In the last years a central issue in regional economic growth debate is represented by the convergence problem. Many empirical economists have noticed that per-worker GDP of poor regions tend to converge to those of richer regions. However more recently it has been observed that the economic...

In this work we propose a highly optimized version of a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm adapted to the more recently developed graphic processor units (GPUs). The programming has been carried out with compute unified device architecture (CUDA) toolkit, specially designed for Nvidia GPUs. For...

Simulated annealing (SA) is a generic optimization method that is quite popular because of its ease of implementation and its global convergence properties. However, SA is widely reported to converge very slowly, and it is common practice to allow extra freedom in its design at the expense of...

In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird ein Modell für die effiziente Allokation von Infrastruktureinrichtungen in einer Region entwickelt. Die Komplexität des Allokationsproblems ergibt sich nicht nur durch die Vielzahl der Kombinationsmöglichkeiten, sondern auch durch die immanenten...

Transit network design is a very important problem. In particular, it has a great influence on passenger satisfaction with the whole transit network system. The present research proposes a simulated annealing (SA) method for optimizing a transit network design. In the algorithm, the strategy to...

An optimization procedure has been developed for branching storm and sanitary sewer systems with a pre-determined layout for determining the minimum total cost. The model was developed within Microsoft Excel using simulated annealing as the optimization procedure. The total cost of the storm...

Shallow water table levels can be predicted using several approaches, either based on climatic records, on field evidences based on soil morphology, or on the outputs of physically based models. In this study, data from a monitoring network in a relevant agricultural area of Northern Italy (ca....

The n-queens problem is a classical combinatorial optimization problem which has been proved to be NP-hard. The goal is to place n non-attacking queens on an n×n chessboard. In this paper, two single-solution-based (Local Search (LS) and Tuned Simulated Annealing (SA)) and two population-based...

In recent years, adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a standard tool for Bayesian parameter estimation. In adaptive MCMC, the past iterations are used to tune the proposal distribution of the algorithm. The same adaptation mechanisms can be used in Simulated Annealing...

A methodology for evaluating real-time optimal reservoir releases under flooding conditions that minimizes flood damages for a river-reservoir system is described in this paper. The problem is formulated as a discrete-time optimal control problem in which reservoir releases are the control...