A two-stage simulated annealing methodology

We propose a two-stage simulated annealing method. While most previous work has focused on ad hoc constant starting temperatures for the low temperature annealing phase, this paper presents a more formal method for starting temperature determination in two-stage simulated annealing systems. We have successfully applied our method to three optimization problems using both classic and adaptive schedules. We also briefly discuss an alternative stop criterion that experimentally reduces the running time up to an additional ten percent in our problem suite