An efficient ant colony system for solving the new Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem

The Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) is an extension of the classical traveling salesman problem and has many interesting applications. In this paper we present a New Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (NGTSP), and the current GTSP is only a special case of the NGTSP. To solve effectively the NGTSP, we extend the ant colony system method from TSP to NGTSP. Meanwhile, to improve the quality of solution, a local searching technique is introduced into this method to speed up the convergence, and a novel parameter adaptive technique is also introduced into this method to avoid locking into local minima. Experimental results on numerous TSPlib instances show that the proposed method can deal with the NGTSP problems fairly well, and the developed improvement techniques is significantly effective.