A New Hybrid Method Based on Nearest Neighbor Algorithm and 2-Opt Algorithm for Traveling Salesman Problem

Traveling salesman problem has been one of the mostly studied problems in combinatorial optimization. This paper proposes a new hybrid method combining the nearest neighbor algorithm and the 2-opt algorithm. The performance of this method has been tested to several benchmark problems from TSPLIB involving 11 instances of symmetric problems and three instances of asymmetric problems with various number of nodes from 17 to 783 nodes. The results show that the hybrid method can reduce the relative error significantly compared to the nearest neighbor algorithm only.