Simulated Annealing for constructing binary covering arrays of variable strength

This paper presents new upper bounds for binary covering arrays of variable strength constructed by using a new Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm. This algorithm incorporates several distinguished features including an efficient heuristic to generate good quality initial solutions, a compound neighborhood function which combines two carefully designed neighborhoods and a fine-tuned cooling schedule. Its performance is investigated through extensive experimentation over well known benchmarks and compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, showing that the proposed SA algorithm is able to outperform them.