Parallelized genetic ant colony systems for solving the traveling salesman problem

In this paper, we present a new method, called the parallelized genetic ant colony system (PGACS), for solving the traveling salesman problem. It consists of the genetic algorithm, including the new crossover operations and the hybrid mutation operations, and the ant colony systems with communication strategies. We also make an experiment with three classical data sets got from the TSP library to test the performance of the proposed method. The experiment results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than Chu et al.’s method (2004).