The Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem: A new genetic algorithm approach

Abstract

The Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) is a modification of the Traveling Salesman Problem in which nodes are partitioned into clusters and exactly one node from each cluster is visited in a cycle. It has numerous applications, including airplane routing, computer file sequencing, and postal delivery. To produce solutions to this problem, a genetic algorithm (GA) heuristic mimicking natural selection was coded with several new features including isolated initial populations and a new reproduction mechanism. During modeling runs, the proposed GA outperformed other published heuristics in terms of solution quality while maintaining comparable runtimes. © 2007 by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.