The multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP) is one of the most important combinational optimization problems that has nowadays received much attention because of its real application in industrial and service problems. The aim of this paper is to introduce a hybrid two-phase algorithm called MASelite for solving the MTSP which can be explained as the problem of designing collection of tours from one depot to a number of customers. At the first stage, the MTSP is solved by the elite ant system ( ASelite ), and at the second stage, the simulated Annealing (SA) is used for improving solutions. This process avoids the premature convergence and makes better solutions. Extensive computational tests on standard instances from the literature confirm the effectiveness of the presented approach.
