Comparing Three Improved Variants of Simulated Annealing for Optimizing Dorm Room Assignments

Assigning dorm rooms to 2500 students with complex and interdependent preferences is a difficult optimization problem. In this paper, we present an optimization method which is based on an improved variant of simulated annealing for the whole dorm room assignment problem. We also compare empirically the performance of three different improved variants of simulated annealing in solving this problem: informed simulated annealing, very fast simulated re-annealing and simulated annealing with non-monotonic reheating.