The research conducted at paper investigated the impact of population size and mutation probability on the effectiveness of the genetic algorithm's performance when utilizing elitism. The role of chromosome (route) decoding in the context of the traveling salesman problem was described, and the choice of ordinal decoding was justified. Real data about cities in Ukraine and the DEAP library were used in the implementation of the genetic algorithm. Based on the obtained results, it has been shown that the use of the presented genetic algorithm structure with the application of elitism is most effective when given parameters such as: elite group size of 20, mutation probability of 0.1, which allowed obtaining the shortest route under the considered conditions.