Solving Multiple Traveling Salesmen Problem using Discrete Pigeon Inspired Optimizer

Multiple Traveling Salesmen Problem (MTSP) is an extended version of the popular traveling salesman problem. In MTSP there are m salesmen that should travel n cities with minimum cost (distance). All the salesmen start their trips from a depot city and back to the same city, each city must be visited once. MTSP is an optimization problem that researchers tried to solve using meta-heuristic algorithms. In this paper, a discrete pigeon inspired optimizer is proposed to solve MTSP. The proposed algorithm evaluated using five instances from TSPLIB benchmark and compared its results with four algorithms from state-of-the-art. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperformed the examined algorithms in most cases.