fitness value forms one generation. Finally, a GA
engine tries to output a set of paths that minimize the
value of f. The optimal solution is a path or set of
paths that have the minimum score (distance)
returned by the function f.
It is found that such an optimization problem can
be solved efficiently using Genetic Algorithm (GA)
(Yuan et al, 2009; Vahdati et al, 2009, Wang and
Zha, 2009; Zhao et al, 2008; Yu et al, 2011). In
addition, GA demonstrates near global optimality,
implicit parallelism, adaptability, and high
robustness (Yu et al, 2011).
In its simplest form, a GA is a probabilistic
algorithm used to simulate the mechanism of natural
selection of living organisms, and it is often used to
solve problems having expensive solutions in terms
of time and computation complexity. This is due to
the principles of selection and evolution employed to
produce several solutions for a given problem.
Generally speaking, GA’s search space is composed
of candidate solutions to the problem (represent
possible paths in TSP). Each chromosome has an
objective function value known as fitness value that
is the path length joining the cities. This measure is
used to favour selection of successful parents for
producing new offspring. Offspring solutions are
produced from parent solutions by the application of
selection, ocrossover and mutation operators
(Lianshuan, Zengyan, 2009). The Offspring forms
the next generation of possible solution. Following
generations are then created by applying these three
operators until one of the two following criteria is
satisfied. Either the maximum predefined number of
generations is created, or no further enhancement to
chromosomes (in terms of overall fitness value) is
observed, as compared to the previous generation. In
all cases, the system will return the best solution
from the last generation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section two lists related work of TSP that is
implemented using GA. Section three describes the
proposed GA model to improve the process of
solving the symmetric TSP. Section four describes
the experiments and results. Finally, Section five
concludes this paper.
2 RELATED WORK
Many approaches and results on evolutionary
optimization for TSP have been published. Samples
of these approaches include the following:
Authors of (Yuan et al, 2009) proposed GA based
on good character breed. The searching space is
divided into segments based on the fine seed. At
first, GA runs several times and gets a perfect
individual every time to gather a fine seed set. To
strengthen the local search, every segment is treated
as a small size TSP to be optimum. This approach
demonstrates a slight improvement when applied to
a small dataset of size 150.
Vahdati et al proposed in (Vahdati et al, 2009) a
new solution for TSP using genetic algorithm. This
technique is based on applying heuristic crossover
and mutation operation to GA in order to prevent
premature convergence.
The heuristic crossover considers each
chromosome as a closed circle. Two pointers are
used for each parent. The decision whether to select
the clockwise or anticlockwise pointer is based on
the fitness. This technique is able to accelerate the
speed of convergence by reducing the number of
generations.
An improved combinational genetic algorithm for
travelling salesman problem is applied in (Wang and
Zhao, 2009). This approach adds a local search
procedure in the standard genetic algorithm. Local
search is performed on the best individual of each
generation. This method increases the stability of the
algorithm in addition to improving the precision.
The authors of (Yu et al, 2011) solved the TSP
using GA in which the algorithm employed a
roulette wheel based selection mechanism, the use of
a survival-of-the-fittest strategy, a heuristic
crossover operator, and an inversion operator. This
approach was applied in TSP with 50 cities, and it
was able to quickly obtain an optimal solution to
TSP from a huge search space. However, this study
is not provided with clear figures to demonstrate the
level of improvement over other techniques as stated
by the authors.
A multi-objective TSP that is implemented using
GA is presented in (Lianshuan and Zengyan, 2009).
It creates an initial population which satisfies the
basic qualification, then it calculates the two
objective-values: distance and cost. The aim is to
find the minimal of both the distance and the cost.
The objective value is then used to rank the
chromosomes with Pareto function. However, this
approach is not provided with clear figures to
demonstrate the level of accuracy and how quickly
the result is obtained.
Takahashi (Takahashi, 2011) suggested solving
TSP through a Combinational method called:
iterative Extended Changing Crossover Operators.
This method combines Edge Assembly Crossover
(EAX) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). At the
first stage, ACO tries to search for provisional
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