Solving the time dependent traveling salesman problem

Abstract

In the standard version of the traveling salesman problem (TSP), we are given a set of customers located in and around a city and the distances between each pair of customers, and need to find the shortest tour that visits each customer exactly once. Suppose that some of the customers are located in the center of the city. Within a window of time, center city becomes congested so that the time to travel between customers takes longer. Clearly, we would like to construct a tour that avoids visiting customers when the center of the city is congested. This variant of the TSP is known as the time dependent TSP (TDTSP). We review the literature on the TDTSP, develop two solution algorithms, and report computational experience with our algorithms. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.