Using statistical tests for improving state-of-the-art heuristics for the probabilistic traveling salesman problem with deadlines

Abstract

The Probabilistic Traveling Salesman Problem with Deadlines (PTSPD) is a Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem with a computationally demanding objective function. Currently heuristics using an approximation of the objective function based on Monte Carlo Sampling are the state-of-the-art methods for the PTSPD. We show that those heuristics can be significantly improved by using statistical tests in combination with the sampling-based evaluation of solutions for the pairwise comparison of solutions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.