Exact algorithms for the Equitable Traveling Salesman Problem

Joris Kinable, Bart Smeulders, Eline Delcour and Frits C.R. Spieksma

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 261, issue 2, 475-485

Abstract: Given a weighted graph G=(V,E), the Equitable Traveling Salesman Problem (ETSP) asks for two perfect matchings in G such that (1) the two matchings together form a Hamiltonian cycle in G and (2) the absolute difference in costs between the two matchings is minimized. The problem is shown to be NP-Hard, even when the graph G is complete. We present two integer programming models to solve the ETSP problem and compare the strength of these formulations. One model is solved through branch-and-cut, whereas the other model is solved through a branch-and-price framework. A simple local search heuristic is also implemented. We conduct computational experiments on different types of instances, often derived from the TSPLib. It turns out that the behavior of the different approaches varies with the type of instances. For small and medium sized instances, branch-and-bound and branch-and-price produce comparable results. However, for larger instances branch-and-bound outperforms branch-and-price.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimization; Traveling Salesman Problem; Branch-and-bound; Branch-and-price; Exact algorithms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171730139X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:261:y:2017:i:2:p:475-485

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.02.017

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().