H.R. Louren co. Small steps are most commonly performed by iterative improvement or simulated annealing. Large steps involve the application of problem specific techniques allowing local minima to be transcended even at low temperatures. The limited analysis indicates that this technique has a very high computational requirement but provides better results than if only the local search method is applied. In many situations determination of these values cannot even be realised after several experiments as successful implementation requires much experience.
Poor initialisation can lead to weak final schedules or excessive computing times.
In many methods the termination criterion is the number of iterations and as a result these techniques do not stop when optimality is achieved. It is a relatively new technique with as yet only limited application to P J . Of the large step techniques analysed the best methods are the two random machine implementations.