A Study of Simulated Annealing Techniques for

This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other university. 1 Many areas in which computational optimisation may be applied are multi-objective optimisation problems; those where multiple objectives must be minimised (for minimisation problems) or max-imised (for maximisation problems). Where (as is usually the case) these are competing objectives, the optimisation involves the discovery of a set of solutions the quality of which cannot be distin-guished without further preference information regarding the objectives. A large body of literature exists documenting the study and application of evolutionary algorithms to multi-objective optimi-sation, with particular focus being given to evolutionary strategy techniques which demonstrate the ability to converge to desired solutions rapidly on many problems