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Experimental analysis of heuristics for the bottleneck traveling salesman problem

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Abstract

In this paper we develop efficient heuristic algorithms to solve the bottleneck traveling salesman problem (BTSP). Results of extensive computational experiments are reported. Our heuristics produced optimal solutions for all the test problems considered from TSPLIB, JM-instances, National TSP instances, and VLSI TSP instances in very reasonable running time. We also conducted experiments with specially constructed ‘hard’ instances of the BTSP that produced optimal solutions for all but seven problems. Some fast construction heuristics are also discussed. Our algorithms could easily be modified to solve related problems such as the maximum scatter TSP and testing hamiltonicity of a graph.

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Notes

  1. We did not test linhp318 because its format in TSPLIB was different from other problems and required separate processing to be consistent with our input format.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Subin Punnen for his assistance in preparing the tables and charts. The comments of the anonymous referees assisted in improving the presentation of the paper. We are thankful to the authors of Concorde TSP solver (Applegate et al. 2005) for making it available free of cost for academic research. This solver played a crucial role in the implementation of our algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University Surrey, Central City, 250-13450 102nd AV, Surrey, British Columbia, V3T 0A3, Canada

    John LaRusic & Abraham P. Punnen

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

    Eric Aubanel

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  1. John LaRusic
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  2. Abraham P. Punnen
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  3. Eric Aubanel
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Correspondence to Abraham P. Punnen.

Additional information

This work was supported by NSERC discovery grants awarded to Abraham P. Punnen and Eric Aubanel.

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LaRusic, J., Punnen, A.P. & Aubanel, E. Experimental analysis of heuristics for the bottleneck traveling salesman problem. J Heuristics 18, 473–503 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-012-9194-6

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