Generating mechanism of initial and candidate solutions in simulated annealing for packet communication network design problem

The design of a communication network has long been a challenging optimization problem. Since the optimal design of a network topology is well known as an NP-complete problem, many researches have been conducted to obtain near optimal solutions in polynomial time instead of exact optimal solutions. All of these researches suggested diverse heuristic algorithms that can be applied to network design problems. Among these algorithms, a simulated annealing algorithm has been proved to guarantee a good solution for many NP-complete problems. In applying the simulated annealing algorithms to network design problems, generating mechanisms for initial solutions and candidate solutions play an important role in terms of goodness of a solution and efficiency. This study aims at analyzing these mechanisms through experiments, and then suggesting reliable mechanisms.