A Deterministic Annealing Approach to the Multiple Traveling Salesmen and Related Problems
This work addresses routing optimization problems for logistics and planning, offering a general tool for various TSP variants, though it appears incremental as an extension of existing methods.
The paper tackles the multiple traveling salesmen problem (m-TSP) and its variants by proposing a novel heuristic framework based on the Maximum-Entropy-Principle and Deterministic Annealing, which is shown to be effective and efficient in approximating solutions.
This paper presents a novel and efficient heuristic framework for approximating the solutions to the multiple traveling salesmen problem (m-TSP) and other variants on the TSP. The approach adopted in this paper is an extension of the Maximum-Entropy-Principle (MEP) and the Deterministic Annealing (DA) algorithm. The framework is presented as a general tool that can be suitably adapted to a number of variants on the basic TSP. Additionally, unlike most other heuristics for the TSP, the framework presented in this paper is independent of the edges defined between any two pairs of nodes. This makes the algorithm particularly suited for variants such as the close-enough traveling salesman problem (CETSP) which are challenging due to added computational complexity. The examples presented in this paper illustrate the effectiveness of this new framework for use in TSP and many variants thereof.