A parallel simulated annealing algorithm with low communication overhead

In this paper, we propose a parallel simulated annealing algorithm based on the technique presented by Witte et al. (1991) but with low communication overhead. The performance of our proposed algorithm is significantly better than the method presented by Witte et al., particularly for optimization problems where the time required to communicate the solution is comparable to the evaluation time. The efficiency of the technique is demonstrated using two case studies with good results.