Aircraft route optimization using adaptive simulated annealing

It is demonstrated that simulated annealing (SA) is a viable optimization method for use in route optimization for aircraft flying in tactical attack roles at low altitude deep in enemy territory. It is found that adaptive control of the temperature based on a heuristic measure of equilibrium greatly reduces the algorithm´s sensitivity to the cooling rate while giving a 5- to 10-fold speed-up with no adverse impact on the quality of the solutions produced. These results scale nearly linearly with problem size