The Lin-Kernighan heuristic is known to be one of the most successful
heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). It has also proven its
efficiency in application to some other problems. In this paper we discuss
possible adaptations of TSP heuristics for the Generalized Traveling Salesman
Problem (GTSP) and focus on the case of the Lin-Kernighan algorithm. At first,
we provide an easy-to-understand description of the original Lin-Kernighan
heuristic. Then we propose several adaptations, both trivial and complicated.
Finally, we conduct a fair competition between all the variations of the
Lin-Kernighan adaptation and some other GTSP heuristics. It appears that our
adaptation of the Lin-Kernighan algorithm for the GTSP reproduces the success
of the original heuristic. Different variations of our adaptation outperform
all other heuristics in a wide range of trade-offs between solution quality and
running time, making Lin-Kernighan the state-of-the-art GTSP local search.Comment: 25 page
