Tolerance based contract-or-patch heuristic for the asymmetric TSP

In this paper we improve the quality of a recently suggested class of construction heuristics for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), namely the Contract-or-Patch heuristic. Our improvement is based on replacing the selection of each path to be contracted after deleting a heaviest arc from each short cycle in an Optimal Assignment Problem Solution (OAPS) by contracting a single arc from a short cycle in an OAPS with the largest upper tolerance with respect to one of the relaxed ATSP. The improved algorithm produces higher-quality tours than all previous COP versions and is clearly outperforming all other construction heuristics on robustness

Tolerance based contract-or-patch heuristic for the asymmetric TSP

In this paper we improve the quality of a recently suggested class of construction heuristics for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), namely the Contract-or-Patch heuristic. Our improvement is based on replacing the selection of each path to be contracted after deleting a heaviest arc from each short cycle in an Optimal Assignment Problem Solution (OAPS) by contracting a single arc from a short cycle in an OAPS with the largest upper tolerance with respect to one of the relaxed ATSP. The improved algorithm produces higher-quality tours than all previous COP versions and is clearly outperforming all other construction heuristics on robustness.</p