A stretched simulated annealing algorithm for locating all global maximizers

Work partially supported by FCT grant POCTI/MAT/58957/2004.In this work we consider the problem of finding all the global maximizers of a given multimodal optimization problem. We propose a new algorithm that combines the simulated annealing (SA) method with a function stretching technique to generate a sequence of global maximization problems that are defined whenever a new maximizer is identified. Each global maximizer is located through a variant of the SA algorithm. Results of numerical experiments with a set of well-known test problems show that the proposed method is effective. We also compare the performance of our algorithm with other multi-global optimizers