Backtracking ant system for the traveling salesman problem

Abstract

In this work, we adopt the concept of backtracking from the Nested Partition (NP) algorithm and apply it to the Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). A new type of ants that is called backtracking ants (BA) is used to challenge a subset of the solution feasible space that is expected to have the global optimum solution. The size of this subset is decreased if the BAs find a better solution out of this subset or increased if the BAs fail in their challenge. The BAs don't have to generate full tours like previous ant systems, which leads to a considerable reduction in the computation effort. A computational experiment is conducted to check the validity of the proposed algorithm. © 2004 Springer-Verlag.