Traveling salesman problem: a perspective review of recent research and new results with bio-inspired metaheuristics

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most studied problems in computational intelligence and operations research. Since its first formulation, a myriad of works has been published proposing different alternatives for its solution. Additionally, a plethora of advanced formulations have also been proposed by the related practitioners, trying to enhance the applicability of the basic TSP. This chapter is firstly devoted to providing an informed overview on the TSP. For this reason, we first review the recent history of this research area, placing emphasis on milestone studies contributed in recent years. Next, we aim at making a step forward in the field proposing an experimentation hybridizing three different reputed bio-inspired computational metaheuristics (namely, particle swarm optimization, the firefly algorithm, and the bat algorithm) and the novelty search mechanism. For assessing the quality of the implemented methods, 15 different datasets taken from the well-known TSPLIB have been used. We end this chapter by sharing our envisioned status of the field, for which we identify opportunities and challenges which should stimulate research efforts in years to come.