Parallel implementation of simulated annealing using transaction processing

Simulated annealing is an effective method for solving large combinatorial optimisation problems. Because of its iterative nature the annealing process requires a substantial amount of computation time. A new parallel implementation based on the concurrency control theory of database systems is presented; the parallelised annealing process is serialisable. Concurrent updates to the base solution are allowed provided that they do not have data conflict. Using the travelling salesman problem as the example application, the parallel simulated annealing algorithm is implemented on a Motorola Delta 3000 shared-memory multiprocessor system with eight processors. With a moderate problem size of 400 cities, a speedup efficiency of over 90% is achieved at high annealing temperature and close to 100% at a low annealing temperature