According to an aspect, a method is proposed for defining placements, in a volatile memory, of temporary scratch buffers used during an execution of an artificial neural network, the method comprising: determining an execution order of layers of the neural network, defining placements, in a heap memory zone of the volatile memory, of intermediate result buffers generated by each layer, according to the execution order of the layers, determining at least one free area of the heap memory zone over the execution of the layers, defining placements of temporary scratch buffers in the at least one free area of the heap memory zone according to the execution order of the layers.