Natural Computation for the Traveling Salesman Problem

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem of operations research´s area, which is simple to state. However, this problem is known to be NP-hard, and cannot be solved exactly in polynomial time. Therefore, it would seem to be an ideal candidate for nonstandard algorithmic approaches, such as natural computation. Natural computation is the computational version of the process of extracting ideas from nature to develop computational systems, those that take inspiration from nature for the development of novel problem-solving techniques. This paper is a survey of natural computation for the traveling salesman problem.