A simulated annealing approach to the multiconstraint zero-one knapsack problem

The multiconstraint 0–1 knapsack problem encounters when deciding how to use a knapsack with multiple resource constraints. The problem is known to be NP-hard, thus a “good” algorithm for its optimal solution is very unlikely to exist. We show how the concept of simulated annealing may be used for solving this problem approximately. 57 data sets from literature demonstrate, that the algorithm converges very rapidly towards the optimum solution.