Metaheuristics Approaches for the Travelling Salesman Problem on a Spherical Surface

Abstract

Traveling salesman problem in which all the vertices are assumed to be on a spherical surface is a special case of the conventional travelling salesman problem. There are exact and approximate algorithms for the travelling salesman problem. As the solution time is a performance parameter in most real-time applications, approximate algorithms always have an important area of research for both researchers and engineers. In this chapter, approximate algorithms based on heuristic methods are considered for the travelling salesman problem on the sphere. Firstly, 28 test instances were newly generated on the unit sphere. Then, using various heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, and fluid genetic algorithms, the initial solutions for solving test instances of the traveling salesman problem are obtained in Matlab®. Then, the initial heuristic solutions are used as input for the 2-opt algorithm. The performances and time complexities of the applied methods are analyzed as a conclusion.