A quantum-inspired cuckoo search algorithm for the travelling salesman problem

The quantum algorithm and the cuckoos search algorithm as emerging novel evolutionary techniques has recently drawn a lot of research interest due to their capability to search globally as well as locally by exploring the search space more efficiently in various applications of engineering and management. To the best of our knowledge, this paper first considers the application of quantum-inspired cuckoo search algorithm to solve the classic travelling salesman problems. In this paper, we present a quantum embedded cuckoo search algorithm for the travelling salesman problem. To accelerate the search process for better solution quality, some neighborhood search based construction and stochastic heuristic approaches is utilized in the simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed method is tested with several benchmark test problem instances taken from the TSP library in the literature. The computational results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method is very competitive with the state-of-the-art procedures in the literature.