The Social Spider Algorithm (SSA) was introduced based on the information-sharing foraging strategy of spiders to solve the continuous optimization problems. SSA was shown to have better performance than the other state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of best-achieved fittness values, scalability, reliability, and convergence speed. By preserving all strengths and outstanding performance of SSA, we propose a novel algorithm named Discrete Social Spider Algorithm (DSSA), for solving discrete optimization problems by making some modifications to the calculation of distance function, construction of follow position, the movement method, and the fittness function of the original SSA. DSSA is employed to solve the symmetric and asymmetric traveling salesman problems. To prove the effectiveness of DSSA, TSPLIB benchmarks are used, and the results have been compared to the results obtained by six different optimization methods: discrete bat algorithm (IBA), genetic algorithm (GA), an island-based distributed genetic algorithm (IDGA), evolutionary simulated annealing (ESA), discrete imperialist competitive algorithm (DICA) and a discrete firefly algorithm (DFA). The simulation results demonstrate that DSSA outperforms the other techniques. The experimental results show that our method is better than other evolutionary algorithms for solving the TSP problems. DSSA can also be used for any other discrete optimization problem, such as routing problems.
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