Random-key cuckoo search for the travelling salesman problem

Combinatorial optimization problems are typically NP-hard, and thus very challenging to solve. In this paper, we present the random-key cuckoo search (RKCS) algorithm for solving the famous travelling salesman problem (TSP). We used a simplified random-key encoding scheme to pass from a continuous space (real numbers) to a combinatorial space. We also consider the displacement of a solution in both spaces using Lévy flights. The performance of the proposed RKCS is tested against a set of benchmarks of symmetric TSP from the well-known TSPLIB library. The results of the tests show that RKCS is superior to some other metaheuristic algorithms.