Application of simulated annealing to focal mechanism determination

Simulated annealing (SA) is known as one of the efficient methods for global optimization. It allows for getting an optimal solution by jumping out of local minimum. In this paper, we apply the simulated annealing to determination of focal mechanism solution. To investigate the feasibility of the application, we determine focal mechanism solution of the 14 March 2014 Iyo-Nada intermediatedepth earthquake. The computation of SA method is then 1278 times faster than that of the grid search method.