Lightning Inspired Search Algorithm: Introduction & application to the traveling salesman problem

This paper introduces a novel memetic solving technique for combinatorial optimization problems called "Lightning Inspired Search Algorithm" (LISA). Indeed, LISA uses a constructive mechanism to build promising solutions and efficiently covers the search space. This mechanism is totally inspired by the natural lightning formation and reported models simulating the phenomenon available in the literature. As lightning is the result of a perfect minimizing process of the total charge amount found near or within the cloud by using a linking path between the near cloud and the near ground particles respectively, LISA takes advantage of this to solve optimization problems. To validate it, LISA is tested with several benchmark instances of the symmetric and asymmetric traveling salesman problem. A comparison with other meta-heuristic optimization algorithms is also included. The obtained results exhibit the high performance of the proposed model.