Ant Colony Optimization and Beam-Ant Colony Optimization on Traveling Salesman Problem with Traffic Congestion

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that has various implications in a variety of industries. Even the purest formulation of TSP has applications on from logistics routes to microchip manufacturing, unexpectedly, it can be used on DNA sequencing with slight modification as a sub-problem. In this paper, two versions of TSP were studied, a classical TSP and the TSP containing traffic congestion data. Two state-of-the-art solution methods were used, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Beam-ACO. These algorithms were hybridized with 2-Opt local search and their performances compared on the same benchmark instances. The experimental results show the efficiency of Beam-ACO compared to ACO.