Artificial rat optimization with decision-making: A bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for solving the traveling salesman problem

In this paper, we present the Rat Swarm Optimization with Decision Making (HDRSO), a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the hunting behavior of rats, for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The TSP is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with important applications in transportation, logistics, and manufacturing systems. To improve the search process and avoid getting stuck in local minima, we added a natural mechanism to HDRSO through the incorporation of crossover and selection operators. In addition, we applied 2-opt and 3-opt heuristics to the best solution found by HDRSO. The performance of HDRSO was evaluated on a set of symmetric instances from the TSPLIB library and the results demonstrated that HDRSO is a competitive and robust method for solving the TSP, achieving better results than the best-known solutions in some cases.