Introduction

This project was for the course AI: Search Methods for Problem Solving.

The project statement was very simple - design and code an algorithm for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem as optimally as possble.

Travelling Salesman Problem: If an individual entity wants to visit a number of destinations, what should be the order in which the destinations should be gone to, i.e., the travelling route, so that the total distance travelled is minimum?

Variants of this problem come up in many situations including Vehicle Routing, hence the motivation to solve it.

Since this course taught us many algorithms to search for solutions to problems in the Solution Space and Search Space, I decided to use a hybrid of two Solution Space algorithms - Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing.