A hybrid evolutionary approach for solving the traveling thief problem

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in a recent variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in which the Knapsack Problem (KP) is integrated. In the literature, this problem is called Traveling Thief Problem (TTP). Interested by the inherent computational challenge of the new problem, we investigate a hybrid evolutionary approach for solving the TTP. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach, we carried out some numerical experiments on benchmark instances. The results show the efficiency of the introduced method in solving medium sized instances. In particular, the algorithm improves some best known solutions of the literature. In the case of large instances, our approach gives competitive results that need to be improved in order to obtain better results.