An Agglomerative Greedy Brain Storm Optimization Algorithm for Solving the TSP

The brain storm optimization algorithm(BSO) is a population based metaheuristic algorithm inspried by the human conferring process that was proposed in 2010. Since its first implementation, BSO has been widely used in various fields. In this article, we propose an agglomerative greedy brain storm optimization algorithm (AG-BSO) to solve classical traveling salesman problem(TSP). Due to the low accuracy and slow convergence speed of current heuristic algorithms when solving TSP, this article consider four improvement strategies for basic BSO. First, a greedy algorithm is introduced to ensure the diversity of the population. Second, hierarchical clustering is used in place of the k-means clustering algorithm in standard BSO to eliminate the noise sensitivity of the original BSO algorithm when solving TSP. Exchange rules for the individuals in the population individuals were introduced to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Finally, a heuristic crossover operator is used to update the individuals. In addition, the AG-BSO algorithm is compared with the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), the simulated annealing(SA) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) on standard TSP data sets for performance testing. We also compare it with a recently improved version of the BSO algorithm. The simulations show the encouraging results that AG-BSO greatly improved the solution accuracy, optimization speed and robustness.