Discrete heat transfer search for solving travelling salesman problem

Within the academic circle the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), this is one of the most major NP-hard problems that have been a primary topic of discussion for years. Developing efficient algorithms to solve TSP have been the goal of many individuals, and so this has been addressed efficiently in this article. Here, a discrete heat transfer search (DHTS) is proposed to solve TSP. DHTS uses three distinct phases to update the city tours namely, conduction, convection, and radiation. Each phase performs a certain function as the conduction phase is a replica of the 2-Opt local search technique, the convection phase exchanges the random city with the finest city tour, and the radiation phase exchanges the random city among two separate city tours without compromising the basics of HTS algorithm. Bench test problems taken from TSPLIB successfully test the algorithm and demonstrate the fact that the proposed algorithm can attain results near the optimal values, and do so within an acceptable duration.