An Improved Genetic Algorithm with Initial Population Strategy for Symmetric TSP

A new initial population strategy has been developed to improve the genetic algorithm for solving the well-known combinatorial optimization problem, traveling salesman problem. Based on the k-means algorithm, we propose a strategy to restructure the traveling route by reconnecting each cluster. The clusters, which randomly disconnect a link to connect its neighbors, have been ranked in advance according to the distance among cluster centers, so that the initial population can be composed of the random traveling routes. This process is k-means initial population strategy. To test the performance of our strategy, a series of experiments on 14 different TSP examples selected from TSPLIB have been carried out. The results show that KIP can decrease best error value of random initial population strategy and greedy initial population strategy with the ratio of approximately between 29.15% and 37.87%, average error value between 25.16% and 34.39% in the same running time.