Probe machine based consecutive route filtering approach to symmetric travelling salesman problem

Abstract

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the NPC combinatorial optimization problems and still now it remains as an interesting and challenging problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we propose a consecutive route filtering approach to solving the symmetric TSP with the help of probe concept such that the worse routes are filtered out step by step by using a rigorous predesigned step proportion. In this way, it is important to set up a reasonable value of the step proportion which is needed in each step during the filtering process. Actually, our proposed algorithm is implemented on the set of symmetric TSP benchmarks with both small and large numbers of cities from the TSPLIB dataset. It is demonstrated by the experimental results that our proposed algorithm can obtain the best results in some cases and generally get the approximation results close to the best known solutions.