Finding the best tour for travelling salesman problem using artificial ecosystem optimization

This paper presents a new method based on the artificial ecosystem optimization (AEO) algorithm for finding the shortest tour of the travelling salesman problem (TSP). Wherein, AEO is a newly developed algorithm based on the idea of the energy flow of living organisms in the ecosystem consisting of production, consumption and decomposition mechanisms. In order to improve the efficiency of the AEO for the TSP problem, the 2-opt movement technique is equipped to enhance the quality of the solutions created by the AEO. The effectiveness of AEO for the TSP problem has been verified on four TSP instances consisting of the 14, 30, 48 and 52 cities. Based on the calculated results and the compared results with the previous methods, the proposed AEO method is one of the effective approaches for solving the TSP problem.