A modified elite ACO based avoiding premature convergence for traveling salesmen problem

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most important and famous combinational optimization problems that aims to find the shortest tour. In this problem, the salesman starts to move from an arbitrary place called depot and after visiting all nodes, finally comes back to depot. Solving this problem seems hard despite of program statement is simple and leads this problem belonging to NP-hard problems. In this paper, the researchers present a modified Elite Ant System (EAS) which is different from common EAS. There is a linear function used here for increasing coefficient pheromone of the best route activated when a better solution is achieved. This process avoids the premature convergence and makes better solutions. The results on several standard instances show that this new algorithm gains more efficient solutions compared to other algorithms.