Simulated Annealing With Restart. A variation on the classic Simulated…

In my previous article we discussed how to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) using the meta-heuristic optimisation algorithm of Simulated Annealing. The TSP is a famous combinatorial optimisation and operations research problem. Its objective is to find the shortest distance a salesman can travel through n cities by visiting each city once and ending in the original/starting city. The problem sounds simple, however as we add more cities the number of possible routes is subject to a combinatorial explosion. For example, with 4 cities the number of possible routes is 3, 6 cities it is 60, however for 20 cities its a gigantic 60,822,550,200,000,000!