A new evolutionary programming approach based on simulated annealing with local cooling schedule

The NPOSA (New Population-Oriented Simulated Annealing) technique is introduced as an efficient global search tool to solve optimization problems. Unlike the conventional simulated annealing or its hybrid algorithms, each individual in the population can intelligently plan its own annealing schedule in an adaptive fashion to the given problem at hand. This not only enhances the search speed but furthermore yields a solution near the global optimum. This technique has been applied to solve the traveling salesman problem (TSP) for combinatorial optimization, as well as a continuous function optimization problem, to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness.