Serial and parallel simulated annealing and tabu search algorithms for the traveling salesman problem

This paper describes serial and parallel implementations of two different search techniques applied to the traveling salesman problem. A novel approach has been taken to parallelize simulated annealing and the results are compared with the traditional annealing algorithm. This approach uses abbreviated cooling schedule and achieves a superlinear speedup. Also a new search technique, called tabu search, has been adapted to execute in a parallel computing environment. Comparison between simulated annealing and tabu search indicate that tabu search consistently outperforms simulated annealing with respect to computation time while giving comparable solutions. Examples include 25, 33, 42, 50, 57, 75 and 100 city problems.