Empowering study of delay bound tightness with simulated annealing

Studying the delay bound tightness typically takes a practical approach by comparing simulated results against analytic results. However, this is often a manual process whereas many simulation parameters have to be configured before the simulations run. This is a tedious and time-consuming process. We propose a technique to automate this process by using a simulated annealing approach. We formulate the problem as an online optimization problem, and embed a simulated annealing algorithm in the simulation environment to guide the search of configuration parameters which give good tightness results. This is a fully automated procedure and thus provide a promising path to automatic design space exploration in similar contexts. Experiment results of an all-to-one communication network with large searching space and complicated constraints illustrate the effectiveness of our method.