Multi-objective traveling salesman problem: an ABC approach

Abstract

Using the concept of swap operation and swap sequence on the sequence of paths of a Traveling Salesman Problem(TSP) Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is modified to solve multi-objective TSP. The fitness of a solution is determined using a rule following the dominance property of a multi-objective optimization problem. This fitness is used for the selection process of the onlooker bee phase of the algorithm. A set of rules is used to improve the solutions in each phase of the algorithm. Rules are selected according to their performance using the roulette wheel selection process. At the end of each iteration, the parent solution set and the solution sets after each phase of the ABC algorithm are combined to select a new solution set for the next iteration. The combined solution set is divided into different non-dominated fronts and then a new solution set, having cardinality of parent solution set, is selected from the upper-level non-dominated fronts. When some solutions are required to select from a particular front then crowding distances between the solutions of the front are measured and the isolated solutions are selected for the preservation of diversity. Different standard performance metrics are used to test the performance of the proposed approach. Different sizes standard benchmark test problems from TSPLIB are used for the purpose. Test results show that the proposed approach is efficient enough to solve multi-objective TSP.