A fireworks algorithm for solving travelling salesman problem

Abstract

In this paper, a novel swarm intelligence algorithm inspired by observing fireworks explosions, called fireworks algorithm (FW), is proposed for solving the travelling salesman problem (TSP). The TSP is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problem. The problem is easy to state, but hard to solve. Many real-world problems can be formulated as instances of the TSP, for example, computer wiring, vehicle routing, crystallography, robot control, drilling of printed circuit boards and chronological sequencing. The proposed algorithm has been performed on TSP instances taken from TSPLIB library and has been compared with other methods in the literature. Computational results showed that the proposed firework algorithm is competitive in terms of quality of the solutions compared to other techniques.