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This paper introduces a new memetic algorithm specialized for the asymmetric instances of the traveling salesman problem (ATSP). The method incorporates a new local search engine and many other features that contribute to its effectiveness, such as: (i) the topological organization of the population as a complete ternary tree with thirteen nodes; (ii) the hierarchical organization of the population in overlapping clusters leading to the special selection scheme; (iii) efficient data structures. Computational experiments are conducted on all ATSP instances available in the TSPLIB, and on a set of larger asymmetric instances with known optimal solutions. The comparisons show that the results obtained by our method compare favorably with those obtained by several other algorithms recently proposed for the ATSP.