A hybrid algorithm using a genetic algorithm and multiagent reinforcement learning heuristic to solve the traveling salesman problem

Abstract

In recent years, hybrid genetic algorithms (GAs) have received significant interest and are widely being used to solve real-world problems. The hybridization of heuristic methods aims at incorporating benefits of stand-alone heuristics in order to achieve better results for the optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a hybridization of GAs and Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) heuristic for solving Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The hybridization process is implemented by producing the initial population of GA, using MARL heuristic. In this way, GA with a novel crossover operator, which we have called Smart Multi-point crossover, acts as tour improvement heuristic and MARL acts as construction heuristic. Numerical results based on several TSP datasets taken from the TSPLIB demonstrate that proposed method found optimum solution of many TSP datasets and near optimum of the others and enable to compete with nine state-of-the-art algorithms, in terms of solution quality and CPU time.