Solving travelling salesman problem using black hole algorithm

Over the last few decades, many nature-inspired algorithms have been proposed for solving complex and difficult problems. Each algorithm has its own merits and drawbacks. One of the most recent nature-inspired algorithms, which has been applied successfully in many applications, is black hole (BH) algorithm. BH algorithm is a population-based meta-heuristic algorithm that is inspired by the black hole phenomenon. It starts with a random population of solutions to the given optimization problem. The most excellent solution at each iteration which has the best fitness is chosen to be the black hole and the other form the stars. The black hole pulls the stars towards it and causes them to search the problem space for finding optimal solution. In this paper, the application of the BH algorithm on solving travelling salesman problem (TSP) is investigated. The aim of TSP is to find a tour in a set of cities in such a way, each city is visited exactly once and return to the starting city where the length of the tour is minimized. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the BH algorithm, it has been tested on several benchmark data sets and compared to other well-known algorithms. The experimental results show that the BH algorithm can find high-quality solutions compared to genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization and particle swarms optimization algorithms. Moreover, the BH algorithm is faster than other test algorithms.