Ant Supervised by Firefly Algorithm with a Local Search Mechanism, ASFA-2Opt

The traveling salesman problem, TSP, is a NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem with a set of public test benches allowing design, benchmarking, and comparative investigations of its potential solvers. The interest in this problem comes from the fact that it represents typically similar combinatorial problems. Heuristics solvers of such problems showed their effectiveness essentially in term of cost/time balance, this paper investigates a self-adaptive heuristically hierarchical hybridization involving ant colony optimization, ACO, and the Firefly Algorithm, FA, and a 2-options local search policy, Ls-2Opt. The proposal is called Ant supervised by Firefly, ASFA-2Opt. The paper details the hybridization schema, with an application and a comparative test to related techniques, ASFA-2Opt gives better results in the following cases: eil51, berlin52, st70, eil76, rat99, kroA100, eil101, ch150, and kroA200.