A New Competitive Travelling Salesmen Problem Based on Metaheuristics

Abstract

Competitive travelling salesman problem (CTSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem in which number of salesmen compete among themselves to find an optimal solution with larger benefit and shortest path. Despite the importance of this problem and its many applications in real life, the instances that had been studied are few in number; hence, this paper is focused on designing and constructing more instances to reflect many real life situations. The proposed instances simulate the vehicle routing problem with time windows and the team orienteering problem with time windows. One of the recent swarm intelligence algorithms is salp swarm algorithm (SSA), which is characterized as being simple and flexible, is developed to handle CTSP. Finally, the experimental results illustrate that the new designed instances simulating various real life case are suitable to represent CTSP and the proposed hybridized SSA is better than the standard SSA in solving variant CTSP instances