Improved and discrete cuckoo search for solving the travelling salesman problem

Abstract

Improved and Discrete Cuckoo Search (DCS) algorithm for solving the famous travelling salesman problem (TSP), an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, is recently developed by Ouaarab, Ahiod, and Yang in 2013, based on the cuckoo search (CS), developed by Yang and Deb in 2009. DCS first reconstructs the population of CS by introducing a new category of cuckoos in order to improve its search efficiency, and adapts it to TSP based on the terminology used either in inspiration source of CS or in its continuous search space. The performance of the proposed DCS is tested against a set of benchmarks of symmetric TSP from the well-known TSPLIB library. The results of the tests show that DCS is superior to some other metaheuristics. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.