I am working on a project that attempts to use simulated annealing to organise various items into designated sections while maintaining some stability requirements.
For this problem the neighbourhood configuration should remove two or more of these items and switch their places (there are exactly as many items as there are places for them), but I am unsure of how calculated or random this switch should be.
When testing if the stability requirements are fulfilled, I am able to tell vaguely how items should be repositioned in order to improve the stability, but should the neighbourhood configuration take this into account? Or will that make the algorithm too "greedy"?
Any help/direction is much appreciated!
I have some experience with simulated annealing problems, but I don't know what you mean by 'neighbourhood configuration'. My scenario used the following rules: 1) if making the simulation lower energy, always accept the exchange 2) if making the simulation higher energy, calculate a probability of exchange using the Boltzmann factor and randomise a yes/no for acceptance. "Energy" is abstracted as counting all the non-same-type nearest neighbour interactions and subtracting all the same-type interactions, so that segregating into regions of similar neighbours is energetically favourable.