TSP with multiple time-windows and selective cities

Abstract

We address a special TSP in which the set of cities is partitioned into two subsets: mandatory cities and selective cities. All mandatory cities should be visited once within one of the corresponding predefined multiple time windows. A subset of the selective cities, whose cardinality depends on the tour completion time, should be visited within one of the associated multiple time windows. The objective is to plan a tour, not exceeding a predefined number of days, that minimizes a linear combination of the total traveled distance as well as the total waiting time. We present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for the problem and propose a heuristic approach to solve it. Computational experiments address two real world problems that arise in different practical contexts. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.