Hysteretic optimization for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Hysteretic optimization (HO) is a recently proposed heuristic physical optimization algorithm based on the well-known demagnetization process of magnetic materials in magnetism. The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is an important variant of the vehicle routing problem which is one of the most important and intensively studied combinatorial optimization problems. In this study, we apply HO to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), by generalizing the external field and endowing the configuration space with a proper distance. The experimental results with benchmark problems show the proposed method is competitive with other popular algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithms.