  Combinatorial optimization problems are typically NP-hard, and thus very
challenging to solve. In this paper, we present the random key cuckoo search
(RKCS) algorithm for solving the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). We
used a simplified random-key encoding scheme to pass from a continuous space
(real numbers) to a combinatorial space. We also consider the displacement of a
solution in both spaces using Levy flights. The performance of the proposed
RKCS is tested against a set of benchmarks of symmetric TSP from the well-known
TSPLIB library. The results of the tests show that RKCS is superior to some
other metaheuristic algorithms.
