An ant colony optimization method for generalized TSP problem

Focused on a variation of the euclidean traveling salesman problem (TSP), namely, the generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP), this paper extends the ant colony optimization method from TSP to this field. By considering the group influence, an improved method is further improved. To avoid locking into local minima, a mutation process and a local searching technique are also introduced into this method. Numerical results show that the proposed method can deal with the GTSP problems fairly well, and the developed mutation process and local search technique are effective. (C) 2008 National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier Limited and Science in China Press. All rights reserved.