Effect of the initial population construction on the DBMEA algorithm searching for the optimal solution of the traveling salesman problem

There are many factors that affect the performance of the evolutionary and memetic algorithms. One of these factors is the proper selection of the initial population, as it represents a very important criterion contributing to the convergence speed. Selecting a conveniently preprocessed initial population definitely increases the convergence speed and thus accelerates the probability of steering the search towards better regions in the search space, hence, avoiding premature convergence towards a local optimum. In this paper, we propose a new method for generating the initial individual candidate solution called Circle Group Heuristic (CGH) for Discrete Bacterial Memetic Evolutionary Algorithm (DBMEA), which is built with aid of a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA). CGH has been tested for several benchmark reference data of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The practical results show that CGH gives better tours compared with other well-known heuristic tour construction methods.