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Iterative Cartesian Genetic Programming: Creating General Algorithms for Solving Travelling Salesman Problems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9594))

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms have been widely used to optimise or design search algorithms, however, very few have considered evolving iterative algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel extension to Cartesian Genetic Programming that allows it to encode iterative algorithms. We apply this technique to the Traveling Salesman Problem to produce human-readable solvers which can be then be independently implemented. Our experimental results demonstrate that the evolved solvers scale well to much larger TSP instances than those used for training.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    d1291, u2152, usa23505 and d18512 are benchmarks from the well-known TSPLIB. The remaining instances are benchmarks from real-life geographical data; these are wi29, dj38, qa194, zi929, ca4663, ym7663, ja9874, gr9882, sw24978. All these instances can be found at http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/world/countries.html and http://comopt.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/software/TSPLIB95/STSP.html.

  2. 2.

    http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/external/chesc2011/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.hyflex.org/chesc2014/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/groups/comopt/software/TSPLIB95/.

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Acknowledgements

The N8 HPC computer cluster used to host our evolutionary cross-domain hyper-heuristics and test their performance was provided and funded by the N8 consortium and EPSRC (Grant No.EP/K000225/1). The Centre is co-ordinated by the Universities of Leeds and Manchester.

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Correspondence to Patricia Ryser-Welch .

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Ryser-Welch, P., Miller, J.F., Swan, J., Trefzer, M.A. (2016). Iterative Cartesian Genetic Programming: Creating General Algorithms for Solving Travelling Salesman Problems. In: Heywood, M., McDermott, J., Castelli, M., Costa, E., Sim, K. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9594. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30668-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30668-1_19

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