GVNS is a well known and widely used metaheuristic for solving efficiently many NP-Hard Combinatorial Optimization problems. In this paper, the qGVNS, which is a new quantum inspired variant of GVNS, is being introduced. This variant differs in terms of the perturbation phase because it achieves the shaking moves by adopting quantum computing principles. The functionality and efficiency of qGVNS have been tested using a comparative study (compared with the equivalent GVNS results) in selected TSPLib instances, both in first and best improvement.
Keywords: Metaheuristics; Optimization; Quantum inspired algorithms; TSP; VNS; Variable neighborhood search; qVNS.