An open close multiple travelling salesman problem with single depot

• Main Authors: Jayanth Kumar Thenepalle, Purusotham Singamsetty
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Growing Science 2019-01-01
• Series: Decision Science Letters
• Subjects: Open close multiple travelling salesmen problem; Lexi-search algorithm; Pattern recognition technique
• Online Access: http://www.growingscience.com/dsl/Vol8/dsl_2018_25.pdf

This paper introduces a novel practical variant, namely an open close multiple travelling salesmen problem with single depot (OCMTSP) that concerns the generalization of classical travelling salesman problem (TSP). In OCMTSP, the overall salesmen can be categorized into internal/permanent and external/outsourcing ones, where all the salesmen are positioned at the depot city. The primary objective of this problem is to design the optimal route such that all salesmen start from the depot/base city, and then visit a given set of cities. Each city is to be visited precisely once by exactly one salesman, and only the internal salesmen have to return to the depot city whereas the external ones need not return. To find optimal solutions, an exact pattern recognition technique based Lexi-search algorithm (LSA) is developed which has been subjected in Matlab. Comparative computational results of the LSA have been made with the existing methods for general multiple travelling salesman problem (MTSP). Further, to test the performance of LSA, computational experiments have been carried out on some benchmark as well as randomly generated test instances for OCMTSP, and results are reported. The overall computational results demonstrate that the proposed LSA is efficient in providing optimal and sub-optimal solutions within the considerable CPU times.