An Improved Modular Hybrid Ant Colony Approach for Solving Traveling Salesman Problem

Our primary aim is to design a framework to solve the well known traveling salesman problem(TSP) using combined approach of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Several solutions exists for the above problem using ACO or GA and even using a hybrid approach of ACO and GA. Our framework gives the optimal solution for the above problem by using the modular hybrid approach of ACO and GA along with heuristic approaches.We have incorporated GA, RemoveSharp and LocalOpt heuristic approaches in ACO module, hence each iteration calls the GA and heuristics within ACO module which results in a higher amount of pheromone deposited in the optimal path for global pheromone update. As a result the convergence is quicker and solution is optimal.