The Travelling Salesman Problem - TSP is one of the most explored problems in
the scientific literature to solve real problems regarding the economy,
transportation, and logistics, to cite a few cases. Adapting TSP to solve
different problems has originated several variants of the optimization problem
with more complex objectives and different restrictions. Metaheuristics have
been used to solve the problem in polynomial time. Several studies have tried
hybridising metaheuristics with specialised heuristics to improve the quality
of the solutions. However, we have found no study to evaluate whether the
searching mechanism of a particular metaheuristic is more adequate for
exploring hybridization. This paper focuses on the solution of the classical
TSP using high-level hybridisations, experimenting with eight metaheuristics
and heuristics derived from k-OPT, SISR, and segment intersection search,
resulting in twenty-four combinations. Some combinations allow more than one
set of searching parameters. Problems with 50 to 280 cities are solved.
Parameter tuning of the metaheuristics is not carried out, exploiting the
different searching patterns of the eight metaheuristics instead. The
solutions' quality is compared to those presented in the literature.