Implementation of intelligent water drops algorithm to solve graph-based travelling salesman problem

Abstract

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most sought out NP-hard, routing problems in the literature. TSP is important with respect to some real-life applications, especially when tour is generated in real time. The objective of this paper is to apply the intelligent water drops algorithm to solve graph-based TSP (GB-TSP). The intelligent water drops (IWD) algorithm is a new meta-heuristic approach belonging to a class of swarm intelligence-based algorithm. It is inspired from observing natural water drops that flow in rivers. The idea of path finding of rivers is used to find the near-optimal solution of the travelling salesman problem (TSP).