A comparison of heuristic approaches to the travelling salesman problem

Abstract

In this paper, we present three heuristic methods for solving the traveling salesman problem. Implementations of the nearest neighbor algorithm, the 2-opt heuristic, and the ant colony optimization (ACO) method is tested by using instances from the TSPLIB. Computational results are compared in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency. We also provide results from the variants of the 2-opt heuristic and the ACO method by utilizing an initial tour constructed by the nearest neighbor algorithm. ICIC International ©2011 ISSN.