An Electromagnetism-Like Algorithm for Fixed Charge Solid Transportation Problem

Abstract. Fixed charge solid transportation problem (FCSTP) is one of the main and most important problems in transportation and network research areas. To tackle such an NP-hard problem, An Electromagnetism-like algorithm (EM) is employed. To the best of our knowledge, EM has been considered for any kind of transportation problems. Due to the significant role of parameters on the algorithm's performance, a calibration in EM is carried out with the aid of a set of experimental design. The efficiency of employed parameters is measured by the experimental design method. To evaluate the performance of the proposed EM, a computational study has been conducted and the associated results obtained by the EM are compared with simulated annealing algorithm (SA).