Degeneration simulated annealing algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems

In this paper, we use the physical aspect of the simulated annealing method in order to propose a modified simulated annealing algorithm. The main idea of the algorithm is based to find the optimal solution of a combinatorial optimization problem by switching between two different subsystems of treatment; using so called degeneration of atoms energy. This new algorithm is named Degeneration Simulated Annealing (DSA) algorithm. To illustrate the effectiveness of DSA, it is applied to solve the problems of the minimum distance and the decoding, in coding theory. The computational experiment results obtained by DSA are very interesting. © 2015 IEEE.