Edge Assembly Crossover Incorporating Tabu Search for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract

In this letter, we propose a method to introduce tabu search into Edge Assembly Crossover (EAX), which is an effective crossover method in solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP) using genetic algorithms. The proposed method, called EAX-tabu, archives the edges that have been exchanged over the past few generations into the tabu list for each individual and excludes them from the candidate edges to be exchanged when generating offspring by the crossover, thereby increasing the diversity of edges in the offspring. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical experiments on medium-sized instances of TSPLIB and VLSI TSP.