1994A&A...290..682P

The determination of the orbital elements of visual binaries is often based on the least-squares method. To use this numerical technique requires prior knowledge of a sufficiently precise set of orbital parameters as a first approximation. The aim of this paper is to introduce the method of simulated annealing to determine automatically an initial approximation in the neighbourhood of the global minimum. Subsequently, the Direction Set (Powell's) Method of minimization is used to refine the set of orbital elements. This procedure is fully illustrated with three stars: IDS17121S3453, β 738 and BD+19 5116; the last two being chosen to allow comparison with the orbits found by Eichhorn & Xu (1990).