Random-Key Cuckoo Search for the Travelling Salesman Problem
This is an incremental improvement for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems like TSP.
The paper tackled the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) by proposing the random key cuckoo search (RKCS) algorithm, which uses a random-key encoding and Levy flights, and showed it outperforms other metaheuristics on TSPLIB benchmarks.
Combinatorial optimization problems are typically NP-hard, and thus very challenging to solve. In this paper, we present the random key cuckoo search (RKCS) algorithm for solving the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). We used a simplified random-key encoding scheme to pass from a continuous space (real numbers) to a combinatorial space. We also consider the displacement of a solution in both spaces using Levy flights. The performance of the proposed RKCS is tested against a set of benchmarks of symmetric TSP from the well-known TSPLIB library. The results of the tests show that RKCS is superior to some other metaheuristic algorithms.