“…The mathematical model of the free-form surface inspection path study in this paper is similar to the travelling salesman problem, where the set of cities visited by the salesperson corresponds to the set of points in the inspection path, and the salesperson corresponds to the CMM probe. Intelligent optimisation algorithms [11] are commonly used to solve the travelling salesman problem, such as simulated annealing algorithms [12,13], neural network algorithms [14,15], genetic algorithms [16,17], particle swarm optimization algorithms [18][19][20], and ant colony optimization algorithms [21][22][23].…”