Study on Solving the TSP Using the Slime Mold Algorithm Including Partial Solutions

Proceedings of the 8th International conference on Research in Engineering, Science and Technology

Year: 2018

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/8rest.2018.11.44

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Study on Solving the TSP Using the Slime Mold Algorithm Including Partial Solutions

Mengchun Xie , Koki Furuya and Mitsutoshi Murata

 

ABSTRACT: 

The network constructed by a slime mold in the natural world exhibits the shortest route between several food sources. A method has been proposed that translates the properties of a slime mold into a mathematical model, which is applied to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) to obtain an optimal solution. However, some weaknesses exist, such as that the processing time increases significantly with an increase in the number of nodes in the slime mold algorithm. In this paper, a new slime mold algorithm including partial solutions is proposed to improve the efficiency of searching for solutions to the TSP. The proposed method divides the TSP area into several partial areas and searches for partial solutions, which are then combined into an approximate solution. We perform experiments on a computer for the TSPLIB benchmark problems to compare the proposed method with the conventional approach.

Keywords: Slime Mold Algorithm, travelling salesman problem, dividing search area, integrating partial solutions.