Solving travelling salesman problems with metaheuristics

Abstract

This study deals with the travelling salesman problem (TSP) with metaheuristics which is the most general class of the stochastic optimization techniques. The TSP is a NP-hard problem in optimization studied in both operations research and computer science. Metaheuristics are efficient alternative techniques for NP-hard and greater dimensional problems and are impossible to solve by classic mathematical techniques. Although widespread uses of metaheuristics exist in international literature, in a study of Turkish literature there were none encountered that contain a general view of them and their applications to the TSP. For this reason, 8 metaheuristic techniques are introduced and applied to different dimensional benchmark problems which are taken from the literature. Results are reported and commented in different ways.