Multi-objective chemical reaction optimization based decomposition for multi-objective traveling salesman problem

The multi-objective traveling salesman problem (MOTSP) is a well-known hard discrete optimization problem. Indeed, finding efficient MOTSP solutions is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an approach called, a multi-objective chemical reaction optimization based decomposition (MOCRO/D), which is based on both Tchebycheff approach and chemical reactions concepts. In MOCRO/D, an MOTSP is decomposed into a set of scalar objective sub-problems. The chemical reactions are used to guide the search for each sub-problem. Thanks to the decomposition approach, MOCRO/D optimizes all the sub-problems simultaneously. Finally, the experimental results have shown the superior performance of MOCRO/D compared to NSGA2 and MOEA/D on most of the given test instances.