A \Memetic" Approach for the Traveling Salesman Problem Implementation of a Computational Ecology for Combinatorial Optimization on Message-Passing Systems

In this paper we present an approach for global combinatorial optimization applied to the TSP which combines local search heuristics with a population-based strategy. Due to its intrinsic parallelism and the inherent asynchronicity of the method it is specially appealing for MIMD message-passing parallel computers, such as those constructed from transputers. The approach is similar to that used by M uhlenbein 14] 15] 16], Brown et al. 1], Gorges-Schleuter 3] and work performed by the Dynamics of Computation Group at Xerox PARC 4]. We consider them as prototype examples of \memetic" algorithms in the sense described in Ref. 12] (see also Ref. 5]). A preliminary description of our work can also be found in Ref. 17].