Three new heuristic strategies for solving travelling salesman problem

Abstract

To solve a travelling salesman problem by evolutionary algorithms, a challenging issue is how to identify promising edges that are in the global optimum. The paper aims to provide solutions to improve existing algorithms and to help researchers to develop new algorithms, by considering such a challenging issue. In this paper, three heuristic strategies are proposed for population based algorithms. The three strategies, which are based on statistical information of population, the knowledge of minimum spanning tree, and the distance between nodes, respectively, are used to guide the search of a population. The three strategies are applied to three existing algorithms and tested on a set of problems. The results show that the algorithms with heuristic search perform better than the originals.