A heuristic approach for cluster TSP

Abstract

This investigation took an attempt to solve the cluster traveling salesman problem (CTSP) by the heuristic approach. In this problem, nodes are clustered with given a set of vertices (nodes). Given the set of vertices is divided into a prespecified number of clusters. The size of each cluster is also pre-specified. The main aim is to find the least cost Hamiltonian tour based on the given vertices. Here vertices of each cluster visited contiguously, and the clusters are visited in a specific order. Standard GA is used to find a Hamiltonian path for each cluster. The performance of the algorithm has been examined against two existing algorithms for some symmetric TSPLIB instances of various sizes. The computational results show the proposed algorithm works well among the studied metaheuristics regarding the best result and computational time.