Scatter search methods for the covering tour problem

Abstract

The Covering Tour Problem (CTP) is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which has several practical applications in the area of distribution network design. Given an undirected graph, the problem asks to identify a minimum cost cycle passing through a subset of vertices such that every vertex not in the cycle lies within a given distance from at least one node in the cycle. Being a generalization of the TSP, CTP is NP-hard. This paper presents three original Scatter Search heuristic algorithms for the CTP. Computational results are reported.© 2005 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.