How do we derive efficiency from robustness in the virtual ant solution to the traveling salesman problem?

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Using virtual ants/swarm intelligence to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem is an example of using a robust system to solve an efficiency problem. We normally think of robustness and efficiency as being opposed to one another — but here that’s not the case. Are there cases of using “efficient methods” to find “robust solutions”? What would a “robust solution” to the Traveling Salesman Problem be? Would it be a solution for which a perturbation of the path would not cause a large growth in the cost? Wouldn’t this be something logistics companies would be interested in?