GAs for Route Optimization
M. Ümit Uyar · 2025
This chapter presents another important application of genetic algorithms (GAs), namely the route optimization problem, where a set of nodes interconnected with segments with different cost values are to be covered with minimum cost. Optimization problems for engineering tasks are often complex and frequently need to determine the most effective ordering of a sequence of actions to accomplish a given set of goals. The chapter presents a GA-based solution to the travelling salesman problem (TSP) such that the order of the cities to be visited constitutes a chromosome, and the length of the cycle is the fitness of a solution. It presents simplistic Python and Matlab scripts implementing this GA-based approach to the TSP. The computational complexity of this GA-based solution is linear with the number of cities, although an absolute minimum is not guaranteed for large problems (with tens of thousands of nodes) due to the probabilistic nature of GAs.