A Literature Review on the Applications of Simulated Annealing in Production Engineering

In this paper, an effort is made to give a brief overview on Simulated Annealing (SA) technique based on the review of past research works. The review is primarily done to search out the applications of this heuristic technique in various optimization related problems of Production Engineering. For this, more than hundred research papers published in different reputed international journals during the year 2000-2005 are selected to critically analyze the role of Simulated Annealing as an improved optimization tool in present day manufacturing environment. Moreover, the published papers are categorized according to various application areas of Production Engineering, to highlight the specific area where this non-conventional optimization technique has been widely used to provide optimal solutions. Lastly, it is shown that this hybrid optimization technique is rapidly gaining its popularity with respect to time as well as geographical boundaries.