Perspective Chapter: Experimental Analysis of Black Hole Algorithm with Heuristic Algorithms in Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

Black hole algorithm (BHA) is a popular metaheuristic algorithm proposed and applied for data clustering in 2013. BHA was applied to continuous and discrete problems; it is also hybridized with some algorithms in the literature. The pure BHA shows better performance than others in discrete optimization, such as traveling salesman problems. However, it requires improving the algorithm with competitive heuristics. Many heuristics have often been used to construct the initial tour of a salesman, such as the nearest neighbor algorithm (NN), nearest insertion algorithm (NI), cheapest insertion algorithm (CI), random insertion algorithm (RI), furthest insertion algorithm (FI), and minimal spanning tree algorithm (MST). In addition, the black hole algorithm is combined with popular heuristics, such as swap/or insert, reverse/or 2-opt swap, and swap-reverse/or 3-opt swap, and tested with proper parameters in this study. In the experimentation, classical datasets are used via TSP-library. The experimental results are given as best, average solutions/or deviations, and CPU time for all datasets. Besides, the hybrid algorithms demonstrate a better performance rate to get optimality. Finally, hybrid algorithms solve the discrete optimization problem in a short computing time for all datasets.