A Slime Mold-Ant Colony Fusion Algorithm for Solving Traveling Salesman Problem

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is easy to fall into the local optimum and its convergence speed is slow in solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). Therefore, a Slime Mold-Ant Colony Fusion Algorithm (SMACFA) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an optimized path is obtained by Slime Mold Algorithm (SMA) for TSP; Then, the high-quality pipelines are selected from the path which is obtained by SMA, and the two ends of the pipelines are as fixed-point pairs; Finally, the fixed-point pairs are directly applied to the ACO by the principle of fixed selection. Hence, the SMACFA with fixed selection of high-quality pipelines is obtained. Through the test of the chn31 in Traveling Salesman Problem Library (TSPLIB), the result of path length was 15381 by SMACFA, and it was improved by 1.42% than ACO. The convergence speed and algorithm time complexity were reduced by 73.55 and 80.25% respectively. What’s more, under the ten data sets of TSPLIB, SMACFA outperformed other algorithms in terms of the path length, convergence speed and algorithm time complexity by comparison experiments. It is fully verified that the performances of SMACFA is superior to others in solving TSP.