Traveling salesman: a heuristic scaling analysis

In this paper, we analyze two heuristics that approximate the Traveling Salesman Problem: K-Opt search and ant colony optimization. Our goal was to explore how these heuristics perform when run in parallel on multiple CPU cores as well as using GPU computing. We found that the K-Opt search heuristic showed impressive performance scaling results, especially when executed on a GPU. We also parallelized portions of the ant colony optimization and found good scaling. We conjecture that the ant colony optimization could be greatly improved with the use of GPU computing.