Simulated annealing ray tracing in complex three-dimensional media

Simulated annealing has been applied to seismic ray tracing to determine th e minimum traveltime ray path connecting two points in complex 3-D media. I n contrast to conventional ray tracing schemes such as shooting and bending , simulated annealing ray tracing (SART) overcomes some well-known difficul ties regarding multipathing and take-off angle selection. These include loc al convergence (that is, failing to obtain the ray path with absolute minim um traveltime) and divergence of the take-off angle selection strategy. Und er these circumstances, shooting and bending methods may not provide reliab le results in highly variable 3-D media. A flexible model representation is used to accommodate a large class of velocity models.