Novel Metaheuristic Based on Iterated Constructive Stochastic Heuristic: Dhouib-Matrix-3 (DM3)

This paper presents a new metaheuristic named Dhouib-Matrix-3 (DM3) inspired by our recently developed constructive stochastic heuristic Dhouib-Matrix-TSP2 (DM-TSP2) and characterized by only one parameter: the number of iterations. The proposed metaheuristic DM3 is an iterative algorithm in which every iteration is based on two relay hybridization techniques. At first, the constructive stochastic heuristic DM-TSP2 starts by generating a different initial basic feasible solution and then each solution is intensified by the novel procedure Far-to-Near which exchanges far cities by closer ones using three perturbation techniques: insertion, exchange, and 2-opt. Experimental results carried out on the classical travelling salesman problem using the well-known TSP-LIB benchmark instances demonstrate that our approach DM3 outclasses the simulated annealing algorithm, the genetic algorithm, and the cellular genetic algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed DM3 is statistically concurrent to the hybrid simulated annealing cellular genetic algorithm. Nevertheless, DM3 is easier to implement and needs only one parameter to identify (the maximum number of iterations).