FPGA Implementation of Minimum Spanning Tree Calculation Towards Application for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems

Finding minimum spanning tree (MST) occurs in many practical applications, which is in particular essential in solving the travelling salesman problems (TSP) efficiently. The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an application of TSP, whose objective is to visit all customers for delivering items using multiple vehicles with limited capacity minimizing the total distance travelled while not exceeding the capacity of each vehicle. Solving large-scale CVRP involves finding numerous small-scale MSTs because CVRP can be reduced to as the same number of TSPs as that of the vehicles used. In this paper, we demonstrate a parallel implementation of calculating MST based on Prim’s algorithm using FPGA, evaluate its performance using TSP suites generated from CVRP instances, and discuss how to improve the implementation for further performance gain.