A New Operator for Efficient Evolutionary Solutions to the Travelling Salesman

In this paper we present two sets of empirical data evaluating the performance of a new Cleanup operator for evolutionary approaches to the travelling salesman problem (TSP). For raw data we have used standard road mileage charts of the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, which enable us to generate a reference table with appropriate city to city distances. A wide variety of standard genetic parameters (population size, epochs, mutation rate and selection type) is explored, and results allow the comparison of performance both with and without our cleanup operator. The cleanup operator improves the convergence speed by reducing the number of epochs required to identify a near-optimal tour; in each instance a significant reduction is convergence time was observed