A new hybrid heuristic approach for solving large traveling salesman problem

This study presents a novel problem called green travelling salesman problem (GTSP), an extension of the classical travelling salesman problem (TSP). Proposed GTSP considers not just for the route distance, also accounts emitted CO2, consumed fuel, travelling times/speed and their costs with a more comprehensive objective function. The aim of this study is to shed light on the trade-offs between various objectives and offers managerial insights on decisions in a green frame of TSP. Therefore, a nonlinear mixed integer mathematical model is proposed for the GTSP and computational experiments are performed on generated hypothetical instances to obtain optimal solutions through Lingo 11.0. Due to more NP-hard nature of GTSP contrary to the TSP, a hybrid approach contains ant colony optimization (ACO) and artificial bee colony (ABC) methods is designed to solve test problems from the small size for accuracy to the large scale for efficiency and the results are compared to the solutions gained by solving the same problems by Lingo 11.0. The numerical results show that hybrid approach is more applicable and effective than Lingo 11.0 in reasonable time.