The set team orienteering problem

Tat Dat Nguyen, Rafael Martinelli, Quang Anh Pham and Minh Hoàng Hà

European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 321, issue 1, 75-87

Abstract: We introduce the Set Team Orienteering Problem (STOP), a generalised variant of the Set Orienteering Problem (SOP), in which customer locations are split into multiple clusters (or groups). Each cluster is associated with a profit that can be gained only if at least one customer from the cluster is visited. There is a fleet of homogeneous vehicles at a depot, and each vehicle has a limited travel time. The goal of the STOP is to find a set of feasible vehicle routes to collect the maximum profit. We first formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to mathematically describe it. A branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm is then developed to solve the problem to optimality. To deal with large instances, we propose a Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS), which relies on problem-tailored solution representation, removal, and insertion operators. Multiple experiments on newly generated instances confirm the performance of our approaches. Remarkably, when tested on the SOP using benchmarks available in the literature, our B&P method achieves optimality in 61.9% of these instances. This is the first time such a large number of SOP instances are solved to optimality. Our LNS outperforms existing algorithms proposed to solve the SOP in terms of solution quality. Out of 612 considered instances, it improves 40 best-known solutions.

Keywords: Vehicle routing problem with profits; Set team orienteering problem; Exact and heuristic methods; Branch-and-price; Large neighbourhood search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221724007240
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:321:y:2025:i:1:p:75-87

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2024.09.021

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 ().