  TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem), a classic NP-complete problem in
combinatorial optimization, is of great significance in multiple fields. Exact
algorithms for TSP are not practical due to their exponential time cost. Thus,
approximate algorithms become the research focus and can be further divided
into two types, tour construction algorithms and tour improvement algorithms.
Researches show that the latter type of algorithms can obtain better solutions
than the former one. However, traditional tour improvement algorithms have
shortcomings. They converge very slowly and tend to be trapped in local optima.
In practice, tour construction algorithms are often used in initialization of
tour improvement algorithms to speed up convergence. Nevertheless, such a
combination leads to no improvement on quality of solutions. In this paper, a
heuristic algorithm based on the new tour rebuilding operator is proposed. The
algorithm features rapid convergence and powerful global search. In the
experiments based on 40 instances in TSPLIB, the best known solutions of 22
instances are refreshed by the proposed method. Meanwhile, the best known
solutions of the other 18 instances are obtained.
