Prey Predator Algorithm for Travelling Salesman Problem

Visiting most, if not all, tourist destination of a country while visiting a country is an ideal plan of a tourist. In most cases if the tour is not carefully planned, it will be costly and time taking to travel between tourist destinations of a country. If we consider Ethiopia, a country which has been named as best tourism destination for 2015 by the European Council on Tourism and Trade (ECTT); there are many tourist destinations all over the country. The problem of determining the optimum route to visit all the tourist sites with minimum traveling time can be formulated as a travel salesman problem. In this study 17 of the famous tourist destination of Ethiopia will be selected and a travel salesman model will be formulated. Due to the NP hardness of the travel salesman problem, metaheuristic based algorithms are found to be more effective. Hence, a recently introduced swarm based metaheuristic algorithm, called prey predator algorithm will be used to deal with the formulated problem. The simulation result suggests that the best route to visit the selected destination is Addis Ababa ? Sof Omar Caves ? Bale Mountain National Park ? Abijiata-Shalla Lakes ? Netchisar National Park ? Mago National Park ? Omo National Park ? Gambella National Park ? Bahir Dar ? Lalibela ? Gonder ? Semien Mountain National Park ? Axum ? Ertale ? Yangudi Rassa National Park ? Awash National Park ? Harar ? Addis Ababa. It should be noted in some of the sites there is no direct route and hence a route through other cities is used and hence it should be recomputed in the future when a direct route between these tourist destinations is constructed.