A new efficient tour construction heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

The creation of the initial population is an essential part of the population based evolutionary algorithms. An appropriate initial population could lead to much faster convergence speed; in contrast, an inappropriate initial population could even cause getting stuck in a local optimum. In this paper, we will propose a new efficient heuristic method to create initial individuals for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which we will call Circle Group Heuristic (CGH). The results show that CGH creates better tours compared with other well-known heuristic tour construction methods.