An Effective Constructive Heuristic to Find near Optimal Solution for Scheduling and Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper presents a new constructive approach based on simulated annealing for the large scope of scheduling problem can be assumed as traveling salesman problem (TSP). The main contribution of this research is developing a new definition of TSP. We solve the TSP when there are no roads between some cities. This leads us to incomplete graph constructed based on TSP. We demonstrate this reality is strongly adaptable with the real world situation. This research simulates scheduling problems with incomplete ATSP and develops one stochastic heuristic based on initialization and improvement to solve them. Computational results show that operation research approaches is applicable to find final route up to 200 cities in reasonable time. To solve large scale problems, we use a stochastic heuristic which distinct this work from the past researches. Comparison study shows that our approach reaches good solution against one of the best recent algorithm.