Performance Profiles of Simulated Annealing and Very fast Simulated Annealing in Thermodynamic Calculations

Abstract

In this study, we report the application of performance profiles to compare the numerical behavior of the Simulated Annealing and Very Fast Simulated Annealing methods in thermodynamic calculations for process modeling. Specifically, the reliability and efficiency of these stochastic optimization methods have been compared using global optimization problems related to phase stability and equilibrium calculations in non-reactive systems, the prediction of homogeneous azeotropes and the parameter estimation in thermodynamic models. Our results indicate that the Simulated Annealing is more robust to solve these global optimization problems; however, this method is less efficient than the Very Fast Simulated Annealing.