Usage

Quick start

Download and unzip the binary distribution.
Open a command-line window and change to the swarmtsp-1.0-binary directory.
If you are on a Unix-based system, make the swarmtsp scripts executable:

chmod u+x *.sh

The swarmtsp script (swarmtsp.sh on Unix-based systems, swarmtsp.cmd on Windows) takes a configuration file as parameter. For the beginning, you can experiment with the configuration files available in the config directory. Try, for example:

./swarmtsp.sh config/sandbox/pr1002.acs.properties

This will perform 5 runs of the Ant Colony System algorithm for the TSP instance pr1002 from the TSPLib benchmark library, using 3opt local search. Each run terminates after 20 seconds CPU time. Check the results in the file end.result.txt. Start the program using the other configuration files available in the config/sandbox directory and compare the results.

Similarly, you can reproduce the experiments without local search described in this paper, by using the configuration files found in the config/gecco-2010 directory. Warning: these tests are time-consuming.

In order to reproduce the experiments with 3-opt local search described in this paper, you can use the configuration files found in the config/3opt directory.