A Scatter Searchhybrid Approach For Team Orienteering Problem

The Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) is a particular vehicle routing problem in which the aim is to search a fixed number of paths that maximize the scores associated with a set of given locations within a limited time. This paper proposes a scatter search hybrid approach (SSHA)to deal with the TOP. It uses some new operators, called reference set queen bee-method to initializing and updating the RefSet, and greedy select parentsto selecting pairs from a reference set for the combination method to generate a new solution. Furthermore, to improve the quality of the solution, a local search is employed, called steepest descent to exploreneighbourhood in a fully deterministic manner and then selects the best neighbour. Experiments conducted on the standard benchmark of TOP clearly show that proposed approach outperforms the solving methods in the scientific literature. Our algorithm detects all but one of the best known solutions. A statistical test was conducted to determine the algorithm that performed better compared with the others.