Stop criteria in simulated annealing

The authors propose stopping criteria based on statistics collected during the annealing. In contrast to conventional stop criteria, the proposed criteria do not depend on the move set. Specifically, formulae are presented for detecting that an adequate final temperature has been reached. The arguments of the formulae are obtained by observing the behavior of the variance of the score for the instance at hand. The formulae are based on experience with several applications of simulated annealing as well as facts derived from the theory of homogeneous Markov chains.<
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