A New Node-Shift Encoding Representation for the Travelling Salesman Problem

The encoding representation is a critical component of every approximate solving method, and especially for the evolutionary algorithms. This paper presents a new encoding representation to solve the travelling salesman problem by the genetic algorithm. To assess the performance of the proposed chromosome structure, we compare it with state-of-the-art encoding representations. For that purpose, we use 14 benchmarks of different sizes taken from TSPLIB. Finally, after conducting the experimental study, we report the obtained results and draw our conclusion.