Hybrid Metaheuristic for the Prize Collecting Travelling Salesman Problem

The Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem (PCTSP) can be associated to a salesman that collects a prize in each city visited and pays a penalty for each city not visited, with travel costs among the cities. The objective is to minimize the sum of travel costs and penalties, while including in the tour enough cities to collect a minimum prize. This paper presents one solution procedure for the PCTSP, using a hybrid metaheuristic known as Clustering Search (CS), whose main idea is to identify promising areas of the search space by generating solutions and clustering them into groups that are them explored further. The validation of the obtained solutions was through the comparison with the results found by CPLEX.