Solving traveling salesman problems using molecular programming

Molecular programming (MP) has been proposed as an evolutionary computation algorithm at the molecular level (B.T. Zhang and S.Y. Shin, 1998). MP is different from other evolutionary algorithms in its representation of solutions using DNA molecular structures and its use of bio-lab techniques for recombination of partial solutions. Molecular programming is applied to traveling salesman problems (TSPs) whose solution requires encoding of real values in DNA strands. We propose a new encoding scheme for real values that is biologically plausible and has a fixed code length. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulations and by comparison with A. Narayanan and S. Zorbalas' (1998) method.

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