Simulated annealing (SA) is a very promising general purpose algorithm which can be conveniently utilized for various complicated combinatorial optimization problems. But its slowness has been pointed as a major drawback. In this paper, we propose an accelerated SA and test its performance experimentally by applying it for two standard combinatorial optimization problems (TSP(Travelling Salesman Problem) and GPP(Graph Partitioning Problem) of various sizes. It turns out that performance of the proposed method is consistently better both in convergenge speed and the quality of solution than the conventional SA or SE (Stochastic Evolution). In the second part of the paper we apply the accelerated SA to solve the virtual path management problem encountered in ATM netowrks. The problem is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem to optimize the utilizy of links and an efficient SA implementation scheme is proposed. Two application examples are given to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.