GA Selection Strategies for TSP Optimization
GA Selection Strategies for TSP Optimization
Abstract—A genetic algorithm (GA) has several genetic The different selection strategy used in the GA process
operators that can be modified to improve the performance of will significantly affect the performance of the algorithm
particular implementations. These operators include parent differently. This study is intended to examine the
selection, crossover and mutation. Selection is one of the performance of GA when using different selection strategy
important operations in the GA process. There are several ways
specifically in solving the travelling salesman problem
for selection. This paper presents the comparison of GA
performance in solving travelling salesman problem (TSP) (TSP). TSP is a classical example of a NP-hard
using different parent selection strategy. Several TSP instances combinatorial optimization problem. Many production and
were tested and the results show that tournament selection scheduling problems can be reduced to a simple concept that
strategy outperformed proportional roulette wheel and rank- there is a salesman who must travel from city to city, visiting
based roulette wheel selections, achieving best solution quality each city exactly once and returning to the home city [2]. It
with low computing times. Results also reveal that tournament
and proportional roulette wheel can be superior to the rank-
is possible for the salesman to select the orders of the cities
based roulette wheel selection for smaller problems only and visited so that the total distances travelled in his tour is as
become susceptible to premature convergence as problem size small as possible which will apparently save him time and
increases. money [2]. Although TSP is conceptually simple, it is
difficult to obtain an optimal solution. The main difficulty of
Index Terms— Genetic algorithm, Selection, Travelling this problem is the enormous number of possible tours; (n-
salesman problem, Optimization
1)!/2 for symmetric n cities tour. As the number of cities in
the problem increases, the numbers of permutations of valid
tours are also increase. It is this factorial growth that makes
I. INTRODUCTION
the task of solving the TSP immense even for modest n sized
Distance
5
3
2.9
ranking
proportional
4
tournament
proportional RW
small size problem while rank-based roulette wheel can be
3
2.8
2.7
tournament
2
ranking used to solve larger size problem. There is always a trade-off
2.6 1
2.5 0 between computation time and the solution quality. If
0 10 20 30 40 0 50 100 150
Generations Generations solution quality is the main concern and computation time is
14
12
30-city
18
16
40-city still negotiable, then rank-based selection strategy is the best
10
14
12
choice.
Distance
Distance
8 10
6
ranking
proportional
8
tournament
proportional
Future work could be to evaluate the interaction between
6
4
2
tournament
4
ranking
selection pressure and selection strategies. For example,
2
0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
0
0 200 400 600 800
instead of using binary tournament, we could vary the
Generations Generations
tournament size to increase the selection pressure. Future
50 2.5
45
burma14 bay29 work could also extend the model to include precedence
2
40
1.5
constraint TSP. Precedence constraint can increase problem
Distance
Distance
35 tournament
proportional 1
tournament
proportional
complexity and may results in a different convergence
30
25
ranking
0.5
ranking
behavior, which could lead to a conclusion on whether a
20
0 20 40 60
0
0 200 400 600 800
superior selection method exists without regard to problem
Generations Generations
size and complexity.
2.5 1.6
dantzig42 eil51
1.4
2
1.5
1.2
1
REFERENCES
Distance
Distance
50
100 [5]
50
0 0
Probabilities and Tournaments, Department of Computer Science, St.
10-city 20-city 30-city 40-city burma14 bay29 dantzig42 eil51 Cloud State University, 1999
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