Two new heuristic algorithms for Covering Tour Problem

Covering Tour Problem (CTP) is the generalized form of Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which has found different applications in the designing of distribution networks, disaster relief, and transportation routing. The purpose of this problem is to determine the Hamiltoniancyclewiththe lowest costusinga subset of all the nodes, such that the other nodes would be in a distance shorter than the pre-specified one, from at least one visited node. In this paper, two new heuristic algorithms called MDMC and AGENI are offered to solve CTP. In order to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms in small scale, several test problems are accurately solved and the results compared with those from the proposed heuristic algorithms. Also, in large scales, the results of each of proposed algorithms are compared with the three heuristic algorithms existing in the literature. Finally, the effect of neighborhood searcheson the performance of the proposed algorithms will be investigated. The results, show that the performance of the proposed algorithms in small and large scales is appropriate.