By mapping the optimization problems to physical systems, the paper presents a general-purpose stochastic optimization method with extremal dynamics. It is built up with the traveling salesman problem (TSP) being a typical NP-complete problem. As self-organized critical processes of extremal...

This paper presents an improved extremal optimization (IEO) algorithm for solving the asymmetric traveling salesman problem (ATSP). At each update step, the IEO algorithm proceeds through two main steps: extremal dynamics and cooperative optimization. As an improvement of extremal optimization...