A novel metaheuristic for traveling salesman problem: blind mole-rat algorithm

Abstract

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the problem of finding a minimum distance tour of cities beginning and ending at the same city and that each city are visited only once. As the number of cities increases, it is difficult to find an optimal solution by exact methods in a reasonable duration. Therefore, in recent five decades many heuristic solution methods inspired of nature and biology have been developed. In this paper, a new metaheuristic method inspired of the by-passing the obstacle strategy of blind mole rats living in their individual tunnel systems under the soil is designed for solving TSP. The method is called as Blind Mole-rat Algorithm. The proposed algorithm is tested on different size of symmetric TSP problems and the results are compared to the best known results. Initial test results are promising although proposed metaheuristic is not yet competitive enough among other algorithms in the literature.