Solving the Illumination Problem with Heuristics

In this article we propose optimal and quasi optimal solutions to the problem of searching for the maximum lighting point inside a polygon P of n vertices. This problem is solved by using three different techniques: random search, simulated annealing and gradient. Our comparative study shows that simulated annealing is very competitive in this application. To accomplish the study, a new polygon generator has been implemented, which greatly helps in the general validation of our claims on the illumination problem as a new class of optimization task.