Application of Imperialist Competitive Algorithm on Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem

The im perialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is a new h euristic algorithm proposed for continuous optim ization problems. The research about its application on solving the traveling salesm an problem (TSP) is still very lim ited. Aiming to explore its ability on solving TSP, we present a discrete im perialist competitive algorithm in this paper. The proposed algorithm modifies the original rules of the assimilation and introduces the 2-opt algorithm into the revolution process. To examine its performance, we tested the proposed algorithm on 10 s mall-scale and 2 large-scale standard benchm ark instances from the TSPLIB and compared the experimental results with that obtained by two other ICA-based algorithms and six other existing algorithms. The proposed algorithm shows excellent performance in the experiments and comparisons.