An evolution strategy with tailor-made mutation operator for colored balanced traveling salesman problem

This paper deals with an \(\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}\) $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}$ -hard problem called the colored balanced traveling salesman problem (CBTSP), which is a variation of colored traveling salesman problem (CTSP) which in turn is a variation of multiple traveling salesman problem. To effectively solve this problem, an approach based on evolution strategy is proposed where mutation operator is designed taking into consideration the characteristics of CBTSP. The results obtained through our approach have been compared with the results of the novel genetic algorithm (NGA) which is the best approach available in the literature. The results show that our approach surpasses the results reported in the literature for majority of the instances in shorter amount of time.