An iterative three-component heuristic for the team orienteering problem with time windows

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

92 Scopus Citations
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Author(s)

  • Qian Hu
  • Andrew Lim

Related Research Unit(s)

Detail(s)

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)276-286
Journal / PublicationEuropean Journal of Operational Research
Volume232
Issue number2
Online published17 Jun 2013
Publication statusPublished - 16 Jan 2014

Abstract

This paper studies the team orienteering problem with time windows, the aim of which is to maximize the total profit collected by visiting a set of customers with a limited number of vehicles. Each customer has a profit, a service time and a time window. A service provided to any customer must begin in his or her time window. We propose an iterative framework incorporating three components to solve this problem. The first two components are a local search procedure and a simulated annealing procedure. They explore the solution space and discover a set of routes. The third component recombines the routes to identify high quality solutions. Our computational results indicate that this heuristic outperforms the existing approaches in the literature in average performance by at least 0.41%. In addition, 35 new best solutions are found. © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Research Area(s)

  • Heuristic, Routing, Team orienteering problem with time, windows