Oceanographic Experiment Design by Simulated Annealing

Abstract

The oceanographic experiment design problem is discussed in the context of several simple examples drawn from acoustic tomography. The optimization of an objective function?chosen to characterize the array design? is carried out using the technique of simulated annealing. A detailed description of this method and its implementation for the examples above, is provided. Although computationally intensive, when it is carefully implemented, simulated annealing is found to give superior results to more traditional methods of nonlinear optimization.