MESSY SIMULATED ANNEALING

The method of simulated annealing is modified so that the concept of m essy chromosomes is applied. Constituent genes of messy chromosomes ar e specified by their respective names (indices) and values (alleles) s imultaneously. Unlike simple chromosomes (binary vectors), messy chrom osomes may be either under- or overspecified with respect to the probl em being solved. The messy simulated annealing algorithm is a very rob ust and efficient stochastic optimization method which is able to find correct minima of deceptive or highly multimodal objective functions. This is shown by way of a number of simulations.