Ant colony versus genetic algorithm based on travelling salesman problem

Abstract

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is a nondeterministic Polynomial hard problem in combinatorial optimization studied in operations research and theoretical computer science. And to solve this problem we used two popular meta-heuristics techniques that used for optimization tasks; the first one is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and the second is Genetic Algorithm (GA). In this work, we try to apply both techniques to solve TSP by using the same dataset and compare between them to determine the best one for travelling salesman problem. for Ant Colony Optimization, we studied the effect of some parameters on the produced results, these parameters as: number of used Ants, evaporation, and number of iterations. On the other hand, we studied the chromosome population, crossover probability, and mutation probability parameters that effect on the Genetic Algorithm results. The comparison between Genetic Algorithm and Ant Colony Optimization is accomplished to state the better one for travelling salesman problem.