The travelling salesman problem with time windows is a difficult optimization problem that arises, for example, in logistics. This paper deals with the minimization of the travel-cost. For solving this problem, this paper proposes a Beam-ACO algorithm, which is a hybrid method combining ant colony optimization with beam search. In general, Beam-ACO algorithms heavily rely on accurate and comput...

Christofides’ algorithm is a well known approximation algorithm for the metric travelling salesman problem. As a first step towards obtaining an average case analysis of Christofides’ algorithm, we provide a probabilistic analysis for the stochastic version of the algorithm for the Euclidean traveling salesman problem, where the input consists of n randomly chosen points in [0, 1]. Our main res...

This paper addresses a team of cooperating vehicles performing autonomous deliveries in urban environments. The cooperating team comprises two vehicles with complementary capabilities, a truck restricted to travel along a street network, and a quadrotor micro-aerial vehicle of capacity one that can be deployed from the truck to perform deliveries. The problem is formulated as an optimal path pl...

The algorithm of Ant Colony System (ACS) has been found attractive for solving combinatorial optimization problem such as Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The run-time for this algorithm increases with increase in number of nodes. In this paper, we propose an efficient method that reduces the run-time for very large-scale Euclidean TSP problem and yet conserve the quality of solution for cert...

We present in this paper some of the recent techniques and methods for proving best up to now explicit approximation hardness bounds for metric symmetric and asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) as well as related problems of Shortest Superstring and Maximum Compression. We attempt to shed some light on the underlying paradigms and insights which lead to the recent improvements as well a...

Using a landscape raster-based model for optimal route navigation in orienteering sports, velocity related attributes are mapped onto single squares. Both, accelerators and dampeners as well as barriers are taken into consideration. The optimization calculation between points is based on A* while the entire route is calculated by asymmetric traveller salesman problem solutions.

Introduction Integration, transformation and exchange of data are well known and fast growing problems. Solving the integration problem typically requires: (1) understanding and reconciling the differences between various schemas, and (2) generation of mappings between these schemas, which will then drive any subsequent processing of data. The combination of steps (1) and (2) is a labor-intensi...

We give improved approximation algorithms for a variety of latency minimization problems. In particular, we give a 3.591-approximation to the minimum latency problem, improving on previous algorithms by a multiplicative factor of 2. Our techniques also give similar improvements for related problems like k-traveling repairmen and its multiple depot variant. We also observe that standard techniqu...

Several variants and generalizations of the Or-opt heuristic for the Symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem are developed and compared on random and planar instances. Some of the proposed algorithms are shown to significantly improve upon the standard 2-opt and Or-opt heuristics.