A discrete glowworm swarm optimization (DGSO) algorithm is designed to tackle the travelling salesman problem.A new encoding schema and decoding schema are given with the characteristics of the TSP problem

and a new distance formula and encoding update formula for the new algorithm are given.In order to enhance the capability of the algorithm local searching

and to speed up the algorithm convergence speed

the 2-opt local search scheme is integrated into the new algorithm for solving TSP problem.The proposed algorithm was evaluated on 10 TSP test problems.The numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can find the global optimal solution with less computation and evolving time.In case of large scale TSP algorithm can achieve optimal solution of the theory and the error of the optimal solution is also less than 1%.