Application of a Hybrid Camel Traveling Behavior Algorithm for Traveling Salesman Problem

Camel Traveling Behavior Algorithm (CA) is a nature-inspired meta-heuristic proposed in 2016 by Mohammed Khalid Ibrahim and Ramzy Salim Ali. There exist few publications that measure the performance of the CA on scientific literature. CA was implemented to global optimization and some engineering problems in the literature. It was shown that CA demonstrates better performance than Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in global optimization. However, it gives poor solutions at combinatorial optimization as well as in traveling salesman problems (TSP). Besides, a modified camel algorithm (MCA) was applied in the field of engineering and was proved that it is better than Cuckoo Search (CS), PSO, and CA. Therefore, it is a need for improvement in CA by hybridizing with a constructive heuristic (Nearest Neighbor Algorithm-NN). A set of thirteen small and medium-scale datasets that have cities scales ranging from 29 to 195 was used in the comparative study. The results show that the hybrid algorithm (HA) outperforms Tabu Search (TS), GA, CA, and Ant system (AS) for 70% of all datasets, excluding wi29, eil76, pr76, and rat99. Also, it was given that a detailed analysis presents the number of best, worst, average solutions, standard deviation, and average CPU time. The metrics also stress that the hybrid meta-heuristic demonstrates 64% performance in finding acceptable solutions. Finally, the hybrid algorithm solves the discrete problem in short computational times when compared to other test algorithms for small and medium-scale datasets.