Using Feedback Strategies in Simulated Annealing with Crystallization Heuristic and Applications

This paper represents how typical advanced engineering design can be structured using a set of parameters and objective functions corresponding to the nature of the problem. The set of parameters can be in different types, including integer, real, cyclic, combinatorial, interval, etc. Similarly, the objective function can be presented in various types including integer (discrete), float, and interval. The simulated annealing with crystallization heuristic can deal with all these combinations of parameters and objective functions when the crystallization heuristic presents a sensibility for real parameters. Herein, simulated annealing with the crystallization heuristic is enhanced by combining Bates and Gaussian distributions and by incorporating feedback strategies to emphasize exploration or refinement, or a combination of the two. The problems that are studied include solving an electrical impedance tomography problem with float parameters and a partially evaluated objective function represented by an interval requiring the solution of 32 sparse linear systems defined by the finite element method, as well as an airplane design problem with several parameters and constraints used to reduce the explored domain. The combination of the proposed feedback strategies and simulated annealing with the crystallization heuristic is compared with existing simulated annealing algorithms and their benchmark results are shown. The enhanced simulated annealing approach proposed herein showed better results for the majority of the studied cases.