The plant propagation algorithm for discrete optimisation: The case of the travelling salesman problem

The Plant Propagation algorithm (PPA), has been demonstrated to work well on continuous optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate its use in discrete optimization and particularly on the well known Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). This investigation concerns the implementation of the idea of short and long runners when searching for Hamiltonian cycles in complete graphs. The approach uses the notion of k-optimality. The performance of the algorithm on a standard list of test problems is compared to that of the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and the New Discrete Firefly Algorithm (New DFA). Computational results are included.