A new simulated annealing approach for travelling salesman problem

Abstract

The aim of this study is to improve searching capability of simulated annealing (SA) heuristic through integration of two new neighborhood mechanisms. Due to its ease of formulation, difficulty to solve and various real life applications several Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP) were selected from the literature for the testing of the proposed methods. The proposed methods were also compared to conventional SA with swap neighborhood. The results have shown that the proposed techniques are more effective than conventional SA, both in terms of solution quality and time.