A memetic algorithm for symmetric traveling salesman problem

Abstract

Abstract A Memetic Algorithm (MA) encompasses a class of approaches with proven practical success in variety of optimization problems aiming to make use of benefits of each individual approach. In this paper, we present a special designed Memetic Algorithm to solve the well-known Symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (STSP).The main feature of the Memetic Algorithm is to use a local search combined with a special designed genetic algorithm to focus on the population of local optima. To check the performance quality of the proposed Memetic Algorithm, some benchmark problems are solved. Experiments on the benchmark set indicate that the Memetic Algorithm is quite efficient and competitive and produces good convergence behaviour and solutions.