Neuro-immune approach to solve routing problems

Routing problems constitute an important class of problems because they are hard to solve and have a wide variety of real-world applications. Two of the most well-studied routing problems are the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and the multiple traveling salesmen problem (MTSP). This paper proposes the use of a neuro-immune self-organizing network to solve both, TSP and MTSP. The algorithms are introduced and a brief review of the literature on self-organizing networks, applied separately to each of these problems, is performed. To assess the performance of the proposed algorithms, a number of tests are conducted on benchmark data, and the results are directly compared with those of similar works. The results obtained show a better performance in terms of the best solution found for many instances, and an equivalent average performance. The main advantages of the proposed approach are its network constructive architecture and the use of a single growing network to solve the MTSP.