In this work, several simulated annealing algorithms presented in the literature as solutions to different problems were compared in the scheduling of multiproduct serial batch plants. A systematic performance study of the original algorithm, based on the Boltzmann statistics, and a recently proposed algorithm, based on the Tsallis statistics, were analyzed for three different annealing schemes. It was observed that performance (defined in terms of the number of configurations) is more sensitive to the annealing scheme than to the statistics used. We also observed that the overall performance of the simulated annealing procedure is very dependent on the parameters of the algorithm and on the kind and size of the problems. For large problems, algorithms based on the Tsallis statistics converged to the global minimum more frequently than those based on the Boltzmann statistics, although they needed a larger number of configurations to obtain the results.
simulated annealing; scheduling of multiproduct; batch plants
