A hybrid algorithm for probabilistic traveling salesman problem

In this paper Probabilistic Traveling Salesman Problem (PTSP) is considered and a hybrid algorithm is proposed, in which an evolutionary algorithm is combined with local optimization and parallelization techniques. Local optimization methods include 1-shift and 2-p-opt operators. Several basic variants of evolutionary and hybrid algorithms are experimentally tested and compared

A New Hybrid Parallel Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Travelling Salesman Problem with Multiple Transporters

In today’s competitive transportation systems, passengers search to find traveling agencies that are able to serve them efficiently considering both traveling time and transportation costs. In this paper, we present a new model for the traveling salesman problem with multiple transporters (TSPMT). In the proposed model, which is more applicable than the traditional versions, each city has different transporting vehicles and the cost of travel through each city is dependent on the transporting vehicles type. The aim is to determine an optimal sequence of visited cities with minimum traveling times by available transporting vehicles within a limited budget. First, the mathematical model of TSPMT is presented. Next, since the problem is NP-hard, a new hybrid parallel simulated annealing algorithm with a new coding scheme is proposed. To analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm, 50 numerical examples with different budget types are examined and solved using the algorithm. The computational results of these comparisons show that the algorithm is an excellent approach in speed and solution quality

A survey on metaheuristics for stochastic combinatorial optimization

Metaheuristics are general algorithmic frameworks, often nature-inspired, designed to solve complex optimization problems, and they are a growing research area since a few decades. In recent years, metaheuristics are emerging as successful alternatives to more classical approaches also for solving optimization problems that include in their mathematical formulation uncertain, stochastic, and dynamic information. In this paper metaheuristics such as Ant Colony Optimization, Evolutionary Computation, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and others are introduced, and their applications to the class of Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization Problems (SCOPs) is thoroughly reviewed. Issues common to all metaheuristics, open problems, and possible directions of research are proposed and discussed. In this survey, the reader familiar to metaheuristics finds also pointers to classical algorithmic approaches to optimization under uncertainty, and useful informations to start working on this problem domain, while the reader new to metaheuristics should find a good tutorial in those metaheuristics that are currently being applied to optimization under uncertainty, and motivations for interest in this fiel

Traveling Salesman Problem

The idea behind TSP was conceived by Austrian mathematician Karl Menger in mid 1930s who invited the research community to consider a problem from the everyday life from a mathematical point of view. A traveling salesman has to visit exactly once each one of a list of m cities and then return to the home city. He knows the cost of traveling from any city i to any other city j. Thus, which is the tour of least possible cost the salesman can take? In this book the problem of finding algorithmic technique leading to good/optimal solutions for TSP (or for some other strictly related problems) is considered. TSP is a very attractive problem for the research community because it arises as a natural subproblem in many applications concerning the every day life. Indeed, each application, in which an optimal ordering of a number of items has to be chosen in a way that the total cost of a solution is determined by adding up the costs arising from two successively items, can be modelled as a TSP instance. Thus, studying TSP can never be considered as an abstract research with no real importance